Analysis: Integrating climate risks into analysis and planning
Peace operations need to understand how climate change is impacting their security and peace context. Identifying climate-related security risks and assessing the scale of their impact, lays the foundation for prioritizing necessary actions. Mainstreaming these risks into the wider mandates of peace operations can help deliver a more conflict sensitive response.
Key takeaways from CAF21:
- Improve climate “literacy” in peace operations. Apply a climate lens to existing conflict analysis and planning processes, which requires a multidisciplinary analysis that combines quantitative and qualitative approaches. Work with peace operations to identify appropriate methodologies, structures to enhance their capacities. Increase collaboration with climate experts in the wider UN system at country and regional level to support analysis and programming.
- Dedicated capacity and champions. Speed up the roll-out of the ‘Climate Security Mechanism (CSM)’ as a key instrument for comprehensive climate risk assessment and analysis. Dedicated capacities such as ‘Climate Security Advisors’ can serve as “connectors or translators” to build bridges across various thematic areas and help mainstream climate and environmental considerations in peace operations. Adding to more silos should be avoided.
- Regional analysis. Climate security often has a regional dimension whereas peace operations typically have a national orientation. The UN Secretary-General’s “Our Common Agenda” report, underlining the importance of improving the predictive capacities for UN systems, is an opportunity to help peace operations draw from common regional sources of geo-spatial information and climate risk analysis.