Getting environmental governance right in a new era of risk
Authors: Claire McAllister, David Michel and Caspar Trimmer
As the world prepares to mark 50 years since the first Stockholm Conference, the UN Conference on the Human Environment, where do we find ourselves? We know far more about the impacts of human activity on the natural environment than we did back in 1972, and far more about how those impacts can rebound on human society. We have established a plethora of organizations, laws, regulations and treaties designed to mitigate or adapt to those impacts. Humankind is — collectively, at least — richer, better informed and better equipped than ever.
Yet despite all this, and despite significant successes against problems like ozone depletion and acid rain, humanity’s destructive footprint on the natural environment has grown rapidly over the past half-century.
As a result, Stockholm+50 takes place in a qualitatively different context to the original Stockholm Conference. Environmental damage is no longer a looming-but-avoidable threat to development. It increasingly defines the world we live in, including what it takes to build and maintain peace.
In this blog we look at what this means for efforts to accelerate the environmental dimension of sustainable development.
A new era of risk
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)’s Environment of Peace initiative has spent the last two years exploring the peace and security implications of climate change and environmental degradation. We conclude that we have entered a dangerous new era of risk. A new era that is characterized by deeper, more complex and often unanticipated interactions across domains, and across geographies.
One of the clearest examples is the Arab Spring of the early 2010s. A failed Russian grain harvest due to a climate change-linked heatwave combined with the impacts of a policy that encouraged US farmers to sell grain for biofuels rather than food. This raised international grain prices, which in turn pushed up the price of bread in import-dependent countries across the Middle East and North Africa, fuelling dissatisfaction with governments seen as ineffective and out of touch. Dissatisfaction soon spilled over into uprisings whose repercussions are still felt today, even far beyond the region.
Today, Russia’s blockade of the port of Odesa, the main channel for exports of Ukrainian wheat, coincides with a heatwave across South Asia that devastated grain harvests — prompting the suspension of Indian wheat exports — and a spring wheat harvest in China expected to be perhaps ‘the worst in history’ thanks to unusually heavy rains last year. Global wheat prices are already rising sharply as a result, and the food security of millions could be in peril.
Towards an Environment of Peace
So how do we navigate this new era of risk? How do we keep up the momentum towards the fairer, more peaceful and more environmentally healthy world envisaged by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development?
Accelerating achievement of the environmental aspects of sustainable development is obviously a big part of this. Every day of delay in addressing environmental problems heightens the chances that security risks will escalate.
It will involve a rapid and deep-rooted transition in our economies and societies — really, many different but linked transitions. But such a green transition, while urgently needed, cannot succeed unless it is both just and peaceful. We cannot repeat the mistakes that have so often been made in environmental policies, such as dispossessing or displacing communities, or disregarding their deeply felt opposition. And we must think about the wider impacts and indirect consequences of policies, to avoid missteps like the biofuels mandates that boosted food insecurity or tropical deforestation throughout the 2000s and 2010s.
But even if we manage to meet our environmental aims, the damage already done will continue to reverberate. This means we must build resilience, and be ready to deal with unexpected environmental hazards, and socio-economic impacts.
Our report points to three things that will be essential for policymaking for a just and peaceful transition: adaptability, inclusiveness and cooperation.
Adapt to succeed
To be fit for purpose in the new era of risk, sustainable development efforts will need the ability to adapt to both complexity and uncertainty. Policies will interact with each other and the wider world, leading to both intended and unintended consequences.
Policy tools will need to be revised, objectives recalibrated, in response to changing contexts.
A prerequisite for all this is policy analysis that looks beyond narrow policy objectives. In the case of environmental policies, we need processes that consider the wider social and economic implications, including risks to peace or opportunities to promote it.
And because situations will inevitably evolve, creating risks and impacts that cannot be precisely known, decision-makers will need to intervene, learn, and intervene again.
The efficiency of inclusion
These challenges cross sectors and scales, and so must governance mechanisms and decision-making. Policies forged through inclusive and participatory processes will be more legitimate, more effective and, most important, more likely to succeed and be sustained over the long term.
It is especially important to make sure groups that often have less of a voice, like women, young people and Indigenous Peoples, are included and listened to. The people and communities affected must be authors and actors, not merely the subjects, of policy that impacts them.
But when should this participation happen? There is a tendency to limit it to a brief fixed period, say a public consultation on a well-developed plan, leaving little room for adjustment. Consultation at a much earlier stage could lead to better policies and greater acceptance — and fewer resources being wasted on developing flawed ideas.
Another question is how. Participatory processes can sometimes be slow and contentious. We need to develop good models and learn as we go.
Cooperation is the new realism
Inclusion goes hand in hand with cooperation. In the new era of evolving risk, complex challenges that cross issues and borders will become more and more common. Actions that are not coordinated to reflect these interconnections or that exclude relevant stakeholders will not work.
Too much ‘joined-up’ policymaking today relies on individuals — their networks, their willingness to reach out to colleagues, their capacity. But individuals move on. We need to find durable institutional mechanisms that allow coordination and cooperation between policy silos, without adding too much bureaucratic burden.
No country can secure the well-being of its people against the escalating global crises without cooperation. In the new era of risk, cooperation is the new realism.
When relations are tense, as they undoubtedly are today in the world of geopolitics, such cooperation is harder to contemplate, and to implement. But the fact that so much progress on environmental governance was made during the cold war, not least the 1972 Stockholm Conference, shows us that it can be done.
In the Environment of Peace report we explore these issues in more depth. We also highlight promising experiences from around the world, where governments and other actors have risen to the challenges in innovative ways.
The twin environmental and security crises require a renewed commitment to cooperative, collective action. Strengthened multilateralism will be crucial to ensuring that security risks do not undermine progress on the environmental dimension of sustainable development. To this end, we must find the will and the ways to build governance systems that are adaptive and inclusive, and responsive to the needs of all.
This blog is a contribution to a short series on opportunities for peace at Stockholm+50. To learn more about Stockholm+50, please visit https://www.ecosystemforpeace.org/stockholm50. Join us in Stockholm on 31 May for discussion on Making peace with nature: Environmental peacebuilding for sustainable development.
The SIPRI policy report Environment of Peace: Security in a New Era of Risk will be launched on 23 May 2022 at the Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development. To learn more about the report, or join other sessions at the Forum — whose theme this year is ‘From a Human Security Crisis Towards an Environment of Peace’ — register here.
