Attachments
Elizabeth Nelson, with Daniel Ekomo-Soignet and Rachel Forster
SUMMARY
Climate change is not just an environmental issue; it is a risk multiplier for conflict and a threat to Freedom of Religion and Belief (FoRB).
While the connection between climate change and FoRB is not fully recognized, it is crucial to understand how these factors intersect and drive violence, and that solutions can address both climate and FoRB challenges simultaneously. This policy brief emphasizes the urgent need for policy makers to integrate thinking on climate change and FoRB in strategy development. By doing so, we can address the root causes of conflict and foster resilience in vulnerable communities.
Climate change is increasingly recognised as a risk multiplier for atrocities and a driver of conflict, particularly in fragile contexts, where 40-60% of civil wars in the past 60 years are estimated to have been triggered by conflicts over natural resources. The impact of climate change - both direct and indirect - on freedom of religion or belief (FoRB), however, has not yet been clearly articulated. Rather than recognizing their intersectionality, these two issues are siloed, and sometimes even seen as competing explanations for a conflict's root causes. As a result, practitioners and policy makers lose out on valuable opportunities to combat both climate change and FoRB violations simultaneously.
Climate change and FoRB are linked, both as challenges, and in terms of solutions. Governments and international agencies building mitigation and adaptation plans to deal with climate change need to ensure they are both conflict and religion sensitive - to ensure that the benefits and costs of adaptation don’t exacerbate existing religious or ethnic conflicts. Religious leaders are increasingly focusing on our shared concern for the Earth through interfaith action on climate change, contributing at community, national and international levels to social cohesion. Policy makers therefore need to take an integrated approach to climate change and FoRB for all by investing both in sensitive adaptation and mitigation, and interfaith action on climate change at the community level, to build on the potential for win-win solutions.
Since 1982, Search for Common Ground (Search) has worked to transform the way the world deals with conflict: away from adversarial approaches and toward cooperative solutions. In addition to over two decades of religious engagement in peacebuilding, we increasingly work with communities to build a shared resilience in the face of climate change. This policy brief draws on Search and our partners' expertise on these interlinked issues. It begins by highlighting the interlinkages between FoRB and climate change before illustrating how integrated program design can yield positive outcomes for both. It concludes with recommendations for policy makers and practitioners on how to engage at the intersection of these two issues.