Abstract
Localized actionable evidence for addressing threats to the environment and human security lacks a comprehensive conceptual frame that incorporates challenges associated with active conflicts. Protective pathways linking previously disciplinarily-divided literatures on environmental security, human security and resilience in a coherent conceptual frame that identifies key relationships is used to analyze a novel, unstructured data set of Global Environment Fund (GEF) programmatic documents. Sub-national geospatial analysis of GEF documentation relating to projects in Africa finds 73% of districts with GEF land degradation projects were co-located with active conflict events. This study utilizes Natural Language Processing on a unique data set of 1500 GEF evaluations to identify text entities associated with conflict. Additional project case studies explore the sequence and relationships of environmental and human security concepts that lead to project success or failure. Differences between biodiversity and climate change projects are discussed but political crisis, poverty and disaster emerged as the most frequently extracted entities associated with conflict in environmental protection projects. Insecurity weakened institutions and fractured communities leading both directly and indirectly to conflict-related damage to environmental programming and desired outcomes. Simple causal explanations found to be inconsistent in previous large-scale statistical associations also inadequately describe dynamics and relationships found in the extracted text entities or case summaries. Emergent protective pathways that emphasized poverty and conflict reduction facilitated by institutional strengthening and inclusion present promising possibilities. Future research with innovative machine learning and other techniques of working with unstructured data may provide additional evidence for implementing actions that address climate change and environmental degradation while strengthening resilience and human security. Resilient, participatory and polycentric governance is key to foster this process.
Highlights
Policies intended to address the global threats facing people and the planet are implemented in landscape and local-scale projects [1]
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) special report on Climate Change and Land concluded that anthropogenic climate change has negatively impacted food security primarily from the increased frequency of extreme weather events, and that the extreme events lead to environmental degradation further undermining resilience [6]
Co-location of environmental protection projects and ongoing violent conflict is confirmed in geo-spatial analysis of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) portfolio
Summary
Policies intended to address the global threats facing people and the planet are implemented in landscape and local-scale projects [1]. The importance of these projects as the means to achieve policy goals cannot be understated. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) special report on Climate Change and Land concluded that anthropogenic climate change has negatively impacted food security primarily from the increased frequency of extreme weather events, and that the extreme events lead to environmental degradation further undermining resilience [6]. Continental-scale longitudinal statistical analysis over the last decade from Africa shows that climate disaster-related hunger is exacerbated by conflict that negatively impacts production and slows recovery [7]. The authors suggest additional research beyond statistical association is required to understand the relative frequency, inter-scale dynamics and strength of different causal pathways linking observed feedback between conflict, poverty and environmental degradation
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