Overview

Environment and peace are cross-cutting and relevant in all areas of conservation, sustainable development and security.  

The Theme on Environment and Peace focuses on the integration of conservation in conflict prevention, mitigation, resolution, and recovery to build resilience in communities affected by conflict. 

The theme is constituted on the understanding that building more effective environmental governance and policy can reduce conflict and ensure security from local to global levels. By reducing conflict and conflict potential and by strengthening environmental security we lay the ground for enduring social and environmental sustainability. 

As an international expert and volunteer driven network, the theme provides a platform for practitioners all around the world to share information, collaborate and innovate across the field.  We bring together leading scientific and local knowledge, aimed at addressing social conflicts around conservation, resource use and activities that damage environments and ecosystems.

Areas of Focus

We are working on a number of exciting projects and there are many opportunities for members to get directly involved.

1. Conservation in places of armed conflict

• A Union for Peace in Times of Conflict Report. A situation analysis of the IUCN’s work in relation to peace and conflict.
• Developing a platform for Indigenous and local peoples conserving territories in places of armed conflict.

2. Conservation conflicts

• Rights-based conservation, conflict sensitive to conflict transformative conservation

3. Migration, environmental change and conflict

• Task Force on Migration, Environmental Change and Conflict co-led by TEP member Richard Matthew. This will enhance knowledge on interlinkages, drivers and impacts of environmental change, conflict and migration (human and other species). 

Join the Theme on Environment and Peace 

Why you should join the Theme on Environment and Peace Engage, network and collaborate with over 90 members from the Theme and an additional 30+ members in the Task Force on Environmental Change and Migration.

• Join leading scientific and local knowledge experts and practitioners, actively addressing social conflicts around conservation, resource use and activities that damage environments and ecosystems.
• Help build more effective environmental governance and policy to help reduce conflict and ensure security from local to global levels. Collaborate to reduce conflict and conflict potential and strengthen environmental security that underpins ecological sustainability. 
• Make an impact on the work and thinking of IUCN and the policy arenas in which it is active, by bringing your expertise and experience to shape this theme’s work.

If you are working at the intersection of any of the issues listed below, we invite you to engage with the theme:

1. SOCIAL CONFLICTS & PEACE 

• We address social conflicts and peace through inclusion, diversity, access, just conservation.
• Transforming natural resource-based social conflicts (i.e., regarding access to and competing interests)
• Transforming social conflicts involving indigenous peoples and local communities (i.e., impacts of conservation)
• Transforming identity-based conflicts that relate to environment, natural resources or conservation

2. SECURITY & PEACE

• Security is encouraged through resilience, livelihoods and access to resources
• Natural resource security in situations of conflict
• Livelihood and economic security of vulnerable communities affected by the impacts of humans on the environment (i.e., development, extraction)
• Building resilience of communities affected by (environmental) conflict

3. ECOLOGICAL CONFLICTS & PEACE 

• Through advocating coexistence, rule of law, monitoring and appropriate use of technology in conservation practice
• Transforming human-wildlife interactions
• Transforming unsustainable human activities: development, extraction, poaching, endangerment of species, climate change, etc.
• Disaster Risk Reduction
• Addressing wildlife trade and biodiversity threats - CITES / Wildlife Wars / Ecocide

4. PEACEBUILDING

• Culture or Ethic of Peace and the Environment
• Activities and strategies 

5. CONFLICT RESOLUTION

• Rights-based approaches to conservation
• Conflict prevention and transformation