A growing body of research on the links between climate change, fragility and conflict shows that climate change will make peacebuilding more urgent and complex. Climate-sensitive peacebuilding has the potential to significantly contribute to addressing climate-fragility risks. The Peacebuilding Fund and the Peacebuilding Commission have both started to address the links between climate change, fragility and conflict and these experiences can be used to strengthen their engagement on the topic.
Nature and its vital contributions to people are deteriorating worldwide, and the goals for conserving and sustainably using nature and achieving sustainability goals cannot be met by current trajectories, unless transformative changes are made.
Resources, including minerals and metals, underpin the world’s economies for almost all sectors, providing crucial raw materials for their industrial processes. Despite efforts to decouple economies from resource use towards a circular economy, demand for extractive resources will continue to grow on the back of emerging economies. This report maps existing international governance frameworks and initiatives which have overlapping subsets that focus on delivering the 2030 Global Agenda for Sustainable Development.
On 28 January 2020, the German Federal Foreign Office held a conference in Berlin to mark the launch of the Green Central Asia initiative. Opened by Foreign Minister Heiko Maas and the High Representative of the EU Josep Borrell, it brought together the foreign ministers of the Central Asian states, as well as more than 250 participants to discuss the climate and security challenges facing Central Asia—and how the Green Central Asia initiative can contribute to addressing them.
The Expert Group of the International Military Council on Climate and Security (IMCCS) released its inaugural “World Climate and Security Report 2020” at the Munich Security Conference (MSC), the annual and influential gathering of senior international security and military leaders.
This report assesses how peacebuilding programming can produce adaptation benefits, so that interventions simultaneously contribute to reduced intercommunal conflict and strengthened resilience to shocks. It draws on the evaluations of programs that included peacebuilding and climate change adaptation to synthesize lessons learned, develop and test a theory of change, and offer recommendations integrating approaches that consider and address compound climate-fragility risks.
As the EU revisits and updates its climate adaptation strategy and deals with fast-changing external relations, it is essential that policy-makers consider the risks of cross-border and cascading impacts and the Union’s range of influence for mitigating and preparing for them. In this short policy brief, the newly launched CASCADES project sets out the challenge.
Climate change is not only one of the greatest global challenges, but also gives the German Federal Foreign Office the opportunity in the area of foreign policy to support other countries and international organisations in dealing with the impact of climate change and in the transformation towards a climate-neutral economy.
Evidence from existing programs shows that climate change adaptation interventions can contribute to peacebuilding, and peacebuilding can have significant adaptation benefits.