Armed Conflict and Environmental Protection: Global Environment Facility Insights for Security and Sustainability
Publisher: Global Environment Facility
Author(s): Nathan Morrow
Date: 2018
Topics: Assessment, Conflict Prevention, Gender, Programming, Renewable Resources
The Global Environment Facility (GEF) is the largest multilateral funder of environmental protection projects. Here we find, through tiered multiscale meta-evaluative analysis of GEF's online project database, insecurity and conflict result in widespread and severe negative outcomes. Since 1992, over one third of GEF’s global portfolio (>$4bn USD) was invested in countries enduring armed conflict. Sub-national geospatial analysis found 73% of districts with land degradation projects in Africa were conflict-affected. Project-level analysis revealed pragmatic environmental security approaches promoting sustainable development-related governance and empowerment, rather than perfunctory reactions to perceived resource scarcity, resulted in cooperation, improved human security and conflict resolution as a foundation for achieving environmental protection goals. Nonetheless, project implementation suffered security-related delays of crucial technical and logistical support or extreme circumstances where stakeholders were threatened or murdered. Threat identification and risk mitigation are essential to operationalize environmental security concepts but not yet adequately integrated into environmental protection projects.