biodiversity

Environment of Peace: the research report in full

/ Dan Smith / Leave a comment

In the last couple of months I have been writing and posting articles based on the material assembled for the policy report, Environment of Peace: Security in a New Era of Risk that SIPRI published in May and first launched at the Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development. Now, with not a little sigh of relief combined with a real sense of achievement, SIPRI has published the research on which the policy report is based.

It is published in four parts.

  • Part 1, which I had the honour of being the lead author for, is entitled ‘Elements of a Planetary Emergency’.
  • Part 2, led by Cedric de Coning, is ‘Security Risks of Environmental Crises’.
  • Part 3, led by Geoff Dabelko, is ‘Navigating a Just and Peaceful Transition’.
  • And Part 4, led by Melvis Ndiloseh and Hafsa Maalim, is ‘Enabling an Environment of Peace’.

It’s a pretty chunky read – 277 pages and, for those who like to keep count, 1648 endnotes with the supporting references. The five lead authors were backed by a team of about 30 researchers and guided by an international advisory panel.

At the close of 2022, perhaps some of us risk feeling overwhelmed. It is crisis, crisis, crisis all over the place: hunger, biodiversity, energy, economy, supply chains, mental health, security, migration, cost of living and climate. If we manage not to turn away from all of them, it is all too tempting to focus on one or two, either as the magic key for solving the whole lot, or because that’s all the mind can handle.

The uncomfortable fact is that these crises are connected and interacting. The aim of the Environment of Peace initiative that SIPRI set going in 2020 is to understand and explain how those interconnections work, and show how knowing about them can be turned to advantage as we find inter-connected solutions.

Probably the full research report is not everybody’s cup of green tea. But the policy report could be. I didn’t have a hand in writing it so I can contentedly say it is extremely well written and clearly presented and super-well worth the read. And for those who want to explore more deeply or check out the underlying evidence and analytical foundations, the full research report is there for you.

Between two COPs

/ Dan Smith / 1 Comment

It is well established that, worldwide, there is an unfolding, escalating, multi-factor environmental crisis. It is seen in the loss of biodiversity and of biomass, massive changes in the use of land, air pollution, chemical pollution, plastics pollution and climate change. It has effects on health, food security, livelihoods, social and political stability, conflicts and the ability to handle them.

There is no real empirical argument left about any of this. It is getting something done to arrest the slide that is hard.

Two main international agreements attempt to address the environmental crisis: the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. There was a Conference of Parties (COP) – a kind of health check – for the climate convention at the start of November, and there will be one on the Biodiversity Convention in December.

So right now we are between two COPs.

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Indicators of our current insecurity

/ Dan Smith / 3 Comments

Global insecurity today is shaped by the combination of an environmental crisis, in which climate change is prominent but by no means the only element, and a darkening security horizon. These twin crises are linked: each worsens the other so steps to address them can and should also be linked.

Nature and peace: damage one, damage the other; protect one, enhance the other.

To identify possible remedies for the global malady, we need to understand the intersection of problems and issues. But it may be useful to begin by looking at the components. After all, insecurity is not just one thing, nor is the environmental crisis. There are diverse indicators of each.

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Realism means cooperation

/ Dan Smith / 1 Comment

Consider some problems: climate change, the challenges of new technologies, the crisis in nuclear arms control, inequalities, freedom of navigation in the Gulf, increasing hunger and food insecurity, demographic pressures, the greater number of armed conflicts in this decade than the previous one, discrimination and repression on the basis of gender or faith or sexual preference, plastic pollution, pandemics, the sixth mass extinction and more. What conclusions can we draw? Continue reading →

SIPRI Yearbook 2019: Nuclear weapons and other key trends

/ Dan Smith / 1 Comment

The SIPRI Yearbook 2019 is now available on line. It registers key data in the world of peace and security in 2018 and establishes some of the basic indicators that let us track and assess the trends. It is not a comfortable picture.

You can get a quick take on it from my shorthand overview below and/or from the latest short film in our Peace Points series.

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