Defueling Conflict: Environment and Natural Resource Management as a Pathway to Peace
Publisher: World Bank
Author(s): Shaadee Jasmine Ahmadnia, Agathe Marie Christien, Phoebe Girouard Spencer, Tracy Hart, and Caio Cesar De Araujo Barbosa
Date: 2022
Topics: Climate Change, Conflict Causes, Extractive Resources, Gender, Governance
Natural resources management can be a powerful driver of fragility and conflict or a critical tool for peacebuilding. Protracted, cross-border, and compounded transnational challenges such as climate change, resource scarcity, pandemics, rising inequality, illicit financial flows, organized crime, and violent extremism threaten communities around the globe. How natural resources are managed can compound each of these challenges. The results are wide-ranging, from disputed rights to water and land, to unstable economies following climate-related disasters, to inequalities between those that extract resources and those that profit from them, leaving communities with little but disease and degraded lands. Yet the ways that natural resource management can reduce conflict, violence, and fragility range just as widely, with opportunities to grow economic empowerment, sustainability, equality, and governance.
Defueling Conflict: Environment and Natural Resource Management as a Pathway to Peace, made possible through the State and Peacebuilding Fund, makes a strong case for the World Bank Group to scale up investments in environmental conservation, sustainable natural resource management, and climate change resilience to strengthen areas affected by fragility, violence, and conflict. By taking a hard look at how the WBG engages in investment operations in fragile, violence, and conflict-affected situations, the report makes clear the need to mainstream conflict sensitivity across current and planned environment operations, and in a manner that appropriately identifies and addresses the linkages between conflict, fragility, gender, and natural resources.