Attachments
Carolina Sarzana and Salma Kadry
Climate change is one of the biggest crises of our time. Climate threats range from higher temperatures, heavy rainfalls and floods, erratic precipitation, droughts, desertification, and land degradation. This has negative implications on the quality and quantity of natural resources, such as land and water, agricultural productivity, rural livelihood options, food prices, and nutrition security, particularly when there is a lack of adaptation capacities and preparedness measures (Pacillo, 2024). Farmers are at the forefront of the climate crisis where their livelihoods are being jeopardized, and they are faced with many challenges to secure water, energy, and agriculture inputs, and maintain agriculture productivity. This heightens the risk of competition over natural resources and aggravates grievances and structural inequalities related to land rights and ownership as well as land access, management, and governance. In Africa, land-related issues are among the triggers of many violent disputes (Medina et al, 2024). For instance, communal violence in Nigeria and Sudan is tied to competition over scarce fertile land and poor resource governance (Bruce and Bourdeaux, 2013).
Accordingly, the preservation and restoration of food, land, and water systems is critical for conflict prevention and sustaining peace, particularly in the context of increasing climate threats. Early warning systems, climate-smart agriculture practices, and resilient infrastructure that contribute to livelihood security and disproportionately help the most vulnerable people create enabling conditions for peacebuilding, sustaining peace and longterm sustainable development – through the provision of income-generating opportunities, strengthening social cohesion and communal trust-building, alleviating poverty and improving living conditions (Pacillo, 2024). In turn, failure to mainstream climate resilience in food, land, and water programming can become the source of “divergent” or maladaptation episodes or situations where climate adaptation exacerbates vulnerabilities and increases competition over resources or generates grievances that can increase the risk of conflict (Pacillo, 2024; Zografos, 2014).
Despite the increased recognition of the intricate and reinforcing relationship between climate change, food, land, and water systems, and peace, sustaining peace and security have not yet been systematically tackled as part of the formal agenda of the international negotiations on climate change. However, over the past few UNFCCC Conferences of the Parties (COPs), this topic has gained stronger traction in the COP platform where the peace angle has been incorporated in many of the discussions around climate adaptation and resilience, particularly when it comes to food and water security, land issues, displacement and migration, and sustainable livelihood. Moreover, a stronger focus has been put on the complex intersection of climate change impacts and structural vulnerability, specifically climate-related social vulnerabilities that vulnerable and marginalized groups, including rural women and youth, are exposed to. However, there has also been strong emphasis on the positive agency and leadership of marginalized groups in addressing these challenges and exploring ways to support them and bolster their resilience.
On top of these efforts - and for the first time ever – the COP27 Presidency launched an initiative titled: Climate Responses for Sustaining Peace (CRSP) with the aim of ensuring that integrated climate responses contribute to sustainable peace and development in line with national ownership and context specificity. Moreover, the COP28 Presidency featured a Relief, Recovery and Peace Day in the COP program, and issued the COP28 Declaration on Climate, Relief, Recovery, and Peace to call for bolder collective action to build climate resilience at the scale and speed required in highly vulnerable countries and communities, particularly those threatened or affected by fragility or conflict, or facing severe humanitarian needs. More than 90 countries along with international organizations and UN agencies pledged commitment to contribute to the operationalization of the declaration. Likewise, the COP29 Presidency emphasizes that “a pressing issue on the COP Agenda is how to pre-empt potential conflicts that may arise from food and water shortages stemming from climate change” (COP29, 2024).
These concerted efforts aim to leverage the COP platform for building bridges between climate adaptation and peacebuilding and galvanizing action to transform climate adaptation into an instrument for conflict prevention and sustaining peace. This also coincides with the UN Secretary General’s ‘A New Agenda for Peace’ which recognizes climate, peace and security as a political priority and calls for strengthening connections between multilateral bodies to ensure that climate action and peacebuilding reinforce each other and reiterates the importance of advancing integrated approaches to climate, peace and security.
On the Road towards COP29, it is timely to take stock of positive and granular examples of local peace-positive climate adaptation measures and address a practical gap on how peace positive climate-smart agriculture can look like at the local level. Thus, this brief provides a practical example and insights on the design and implementation of a bundle of interventions in Jirapa Village in Ghana, showcasing how climate-smart agriculture practices can strengthen peace and resilience at the village level. This brief aims to enrich discussions around the practical implementation of peace positive climate adaptation interventions in agri-food systems and enhances “sensemaking” of the climate, food, and peace nexus at the local level.
This practical brief is produced by the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT’s MENA Regional Climate Security Hub in its role as co-lead of CRSP’s Pillar 2: Sustaining Peace through Climateresilient Food Systems. The brief is an outcome of a series of consultation meetings with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Cairo International Center for Conflict Resolution, Peacekeeping, and Peacebuilding (CCCPA) and showcases practical work on climate-resilient and peace-positive food systems transformations that was carried out by the CGIAR FOCUS Climate Security Team in Africa.