Themes

After the recognition of climate change as a global security threat, a plethora of actors from all sectors embarked to advance our understanding of the pathways in which climate change is and will affect humans and their systems. To address the risks that climate change pose to peace, practitioners should harness these new technologies and apply them strategically in their interventions.

As resources become scarce, including due to climate change, it becomes critical that nations work together to share the resources through mediation and resolution, and to prevent conflicts, especially as these conflicts can be due to multi-jurisdictional resources, such as water bodies crossing multiple borders, or localized resources.

Digital governance becomes increasingly important to build more transparency and informational equity. This includes building more open source datasets and having governments partner with the privatized cyber industry to ensure accessible data. Digital governance can also place checks and balances for better cybersecurity.

Environmental degradation is closely related to conflict. It can be a contributing cause of conflict. Conflict often causes environmental degradation through intentional targeting of the environment, coping strategies, and the breakdown of environmental governance. After conflict, environmental degradation can affect post-conflict livelihoods and other recovery efforts. Technologies from GIS to early warning systems can help track, understand, and redress environmental degradation.

Climate change brings a series of challenges, including population displacement which can cause loss of livelihoods. It becomes important that people are empowered economically to make decisions and learn new skillsets that can help people adapt to new sources of livelihoods.

The exploitation of natural resources is well known to affect the peace and security dynamics through exacerbating existing grievances, motivating greed, and ultimately financing and driving conflict. This exploitation, in addition, is often highly degrading for the surrounding environment and tends to be linked to negative socioeconomic dynamics such as poor benefit sharing practices, exclusion of vulnerable groups, unemployment and lack of livelihood options. Against these problematics, frontier technologies offer significant tools to address them through, for example, the use of Earth Observation for monitoring of exploitation to ensure sustainability and environmental protection, or employing blockchain to ensure benefit-sharing arrangements that contribute to local well-being and development.