Berghof Foundation: 50 years of conflict transformation

Climate-proofing
conflict transformation
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There is hardly any aspect of life that is not
affected by climate change. At the Berghof
Foundation, we see that climate change impacts
exacerbate existing conflicts or even create new
ones — especially where resources such as water
and arable land are becoming increasingly scarce.
We also realise that a present-day solution to a
conflict may quickly be undermined by climate
change impacts still to come, such as increasing
drought and desertification, shifting shorelines
of lakes and rivers that define disputed borders,
extreme weather events, and other forms of
environmental degradation.
But climate change can also offer the
opportunity for peaceful conflict transformation,
by using common concerns about climate
change impacts as an entry point for bringing
conflict parties to the negotiating table through
environmental peacebuilding.
Peacebuilding organisations such as the
Berghof Foundation need to adapt the way they
work to rise to these challenges, not least because
many of the countries in which we are active
(Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Syria,
Yemen, etc.) are situated in the worst-affected
regions of the world. As a first step, we have
started to build our own expertise in the field to
be able to systematically include climate change
impacts in our conflict analyses and identify
environmental impacts on conflict early on in our
engagement. This reflects Dieter Senghaas’s
recommendation (see page 36) that in its work,
the Berghof Foundation should build on its
tradition of establishing bridges between social
and natural sciences.
However, rather than becoming climate
scientists ourselves, we are building networks and
reaching out to research institutions that focus on
climate change. Forging new partnerships will not
only give us access to the most recent knowledge
and data for our analysis, but will also help develop
important synergies to contribute to a collective
understanding of the conflict-climate change
nexus. Such partnerships will include the wider
climate change community and raise awareness
of how mitigation and adaptation projects may
spark or deepen social conflict.
In our core field of supporting communities
in transforming conflict, the Berghof approach
has always been to avoid quick fixes and
systematically address the root causes of conflict.
With the challenges of climate change, we will
need to strengthen this long-term perspective
even further and develop methodologies to
‘climate-proof’ peace agreements.
First and foremost, this includes raising
awareness among political leaders, influential
individuals, insider mediators and negotiation
teams about the long-term impacts of climate
change in their regions. What type of impacts can
we expect in the next five, 10 or 20 years — and is
there a risk they might derail a negotiated peace
agreement? Could climate change lead to uneven
economic development and rekindle conflict
between former foes?
Once conflict parties and facilitators
alike see the need to think beyond the present
day in regard to climate change impacts, the next
major challenge will be to develop and strengthen
security mechanisms, resource management
systems and political institutions in protecting the
parties’ commitment to peace against the impacts
of climate change and thus help avoid a relapse
into violent conflict.
Climate change adaptation measures
benefiting all parties to a conflict may not
only be important to protect existing or newly
signed agreements — they could even serve as
confidence-building measures in the early stages
of the conflict transformation process. Such
projects could provide short-term benefits for
communities on all sides, thus strengthening the
legitimacy of leaders — while demonstrating that
cooperation can lead to win-win situations, not
only on environmental issues.
Approaches such as global learning and
peace education can play a role too by contributing
to our understanding of climate change and
building individual capacities to transform climate
conflicts in a non-violent way — on a personal,
societal and international level.
At Berghof, we want to help build networks
capable of generating the necessary synergies
to address these challenges. We have reached
out to partners to explore opportunities for closer
cooperation and, in this 50th anniversary year,
are launching the first pilot projects around the
climate-conflict nexus. Through our dialogue
project in Somalia, for example, we are increasing
awareness of the climate crisis and supporting
the development of ideas on how to address and
reduce the impact of climate change on conflicts
both at the community and the national level (see
page 48). There is no doubt that environmental
degradation and other consequences of
anthropogenic climate change will play a much
larger role in almost all aspects of Berghof’s work
in the years to come.
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