Resilience and sustainable peace: Managing climate related security & development risks in the Anthropocene

By casting a systemic lens on vulnerable and fragile contexts, resilience approaches can form an intrinsic part of peacebuilding. Conflicts are increasingly understood as being about the distribution of power rooted within changing social-ecological systems. Using resilience approaches to highlight not only immediate vulnerabilities, but also the wider systems of distributions – i.e. the root causes of change – allows one to take concrete steps towards sustaining peace. Such steps include creating platforms for dialogue among different stakeholders, tracking the businesses and corporations that have stakes across production value-chains, identifying the financial system leverage points that support unsustainable investments, and more.

 Resilience thinking focuses on three things:

• In the context of climate change at a global scale, vulnerable contexts are no longer only shaped by local processes;
• Peace, poverty alleviation, and global environmental sustainability – people and the planet – are deeply linked; and
• Improving human wellbeing for all will require radical and transformative change.