Climate, Peace and Security

We know about the impact of climate change on communities. Heat-waves. Droughts. Flooding. Cyclones. Competition for livelihoods. Local conflict. The impact of climate change is already visible. It is already felt.

While the connection between climate change, peace, and security is attracting global attention, the conversation is focused on risks and threats, from the geopolitical implications of a changing natural world to the mass displacement of people. The peace dimension is too often missing. Global conversations often fail to meaningfully connect with local actors who understand these dynamics best and are already responding with practical, community-driven initiatives.

How is GPPAC working on climate, peace, and security?

At GPPAC, we respond to this gap by grounding our climate, peace, and security work in local leadership, conflict prevention, and peacebuilding. Central to this is climate-sensitive peacebuilding, an approach that builds climate risks and environmental changes into conflict analysis, prevention strategies, and peacebuilding programming. 

Local peacebuilders are often the first to see how climate change impacts the safety and security of people, communities, and societies. That is why our climate-sensitive peacebuilding is locally-led and locally-owned. In practice, GPPAC members:

• conduct conflict-sensitive climate risk assessments,
• adapt prevention methods to emerging environmental pressures like water scarcity, and
• engage communities in environmental education.

How are GPPAC members scaling up local climate, peace, and security solutions?

GPPAC members use the network as a platform for cross-regional learning and collaboration. This ensures that lessons, tools, and locally grounded insights extend beyond their communities and inform practice and dialogue throughout GPPAC’s global community. For example, by doing so, they have identified overlaps with the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda in the Pacific and South Asia. The GPPAC network also connects local peacebuilders to global and regional policy spaces, enabling local insight to shape the climate, peace, and security agenda and bring new perspectives to international decision-making.