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Pathways to Peace: Addressing conflict and strengthening stability in a changing climate

For over a decade, there has been a discourse around climate change and conflict and fragility, framed by climate as a threat multiplier and the prospect of improving peacebuilding and resilience development outcomes by addressing climate change and fragility together. This has led to widespread acknowledgment that if strategies to address these challenges do not consider their interdependent nature, they will fail or, in the worst case, exacerbate fragile situations. Importantly, they will also miss the co-benefits and synergies of including resilience building in climate change adaptation in order to reduce the need for repeated humanitarian assistance and to address chronic vulnerabilities.

Donors and implementing agencies are working to demonstrate the dividends from programming that supports peacebuilding and climate change adaptation (CCA) outcomes, including the approaches that can help achieve them, and the effective ways of monitoring and evaluating the impacts of these approaches.The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been at the forefront of these efforts. Recent USAID programs in the Horn of Africa that engaged pastoral and agro-pastoral communities in peacebuilding activities have begun to demonstrate some results in building adaptive capacity and community resilience in the face of adverse climate conditions, such as drought.

However, a comprehensive review of evidence and practice from development projects that have attempted to address compound climate–fragility risks is lacking. This paper aims to address this gap based on lessons learned from a review of USAID programs in the Horn of Africa as well as other relevant programs that included peacebuilding and CCA. These programs are mostly in arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs) where communities typically have a high dependency on natural resources for their livelihoods and experience a certain degree of conflict that could be attributed to a combination of climate, socioeconomic and political stressors.

The report also includes a literature review on "Approaches to integrating climate change adaptation in peacebuilding programming".

Access here the report and literature review.

 

[This description was extracted from the report's executive summary.]