September 12, 2019 marks one year since South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir and former Vice President-turned-opposition leader Riek Machar signed a new peace agreement. The human and environmental cost of the five-year war it ended has been staggering. [...] Gender-sensitive environmental peacebuilding promises to be one of the strategies needed to resolve these multiple challenges.

On September 23, the United Nations is convening the Climate Action Summit, and while the UN was founded on maintaining international peace and stability, climate change is a risk that the founders could not have foreseen. Given both the unprecedented nature of the climate risk, and our predictive capabilities when it comes to the global climate, much more systemic changes must be made to prevent and prepare for it.

'It is imperative that we routinize and institutionalize the attention for climate change in our counter-terrorism efforts,’ write General (ret) Tom Middendorp,  Chair of the IMCCS and former Chief of Defence of the Netherlands, and Reinier Bergema of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in a new article as part of a series on climate, peace, and security in partnership with the Center on Climate and Security.

In this new report published by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Belinda Goldsmith explains how climate change acts as a threat multiplier and exacerbates a long-running humanitarian crisis in Somaliland, a region that is still recovering from a civil war.

Improved fisheries management can help reduce conflict, foster global cooperation, and increase fish stocks in the face of climate change, according to researchers of the Environmental Defense Fund.

This year, the Nobel Peace Center organised this annual peace gathering for the first time in Oslo, where young leaders and activists come together with decision-makers, Nobel Prize laureates and scientists to produce recommendations to the UN Climate Summit in September.

In 2018, the Toda Peace Institute and the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (University of Otago) organised a workshop on “Climate Change and Conflict in the Pacific: Prevention, Management and the Enhancement of Community Resilience” in Auckland, New Zealand. This workshop resulted in the publication of the Toda Pacific Declaration on Climate Change Conflict and Peace in July 2019.

War is too important to be left to the generals, the former French statesman Georges Clemenceau famously said. You can say something similar about climate change. If we have any hope of tackling the growing climate emergency, governments can’t leave it just to environment ministries to come up with the solutions.

How could minimising material, water, and energy consumption in the EU contribute to conflict prevention? This policy brief explores unsustainable environmental footprints in relation to conflict risk — and what the EU can do about this.