Environmental assets — like shared rivers or disputed borderlands — can trigger warfare. These conflicts are often framed as battles over scare resources. If you get more water, we get less.
But a new Institute for Environmental Diplomacy and Security at the University of Vermont aims to frame this differently — exploring how the environment can also be used as a powerful tool to resolve international and regional conflicts, whether in the Middle East or on Lake Champlain.
The inaugural event of the new institute will be a conference, “Environmental Diplomacy and Security in International Relations,” Oct. 21-23, at the University of Vermont. The conference is open to the public, but registration is required.
The opening ceremony will begin at 5 p.m., Friday, Oct. 21, in UVM’s Billings Hall with keynote addresses by Ambassador Richard Benedick, president of the National Council on Science and the Environment, and Matt Dunne, manager for community relations of the Google Corporation.
“The goal of this conference is to raise environmental issues from ‘low’ politics to ‘high’ politics--the diplomacy of war and peace,” says professor of environmental studies Saleem Ali, director of the new institute, funded by UVM's James M. Jeffords Center for Policy Research. “In the greater scheme of international relations, environmental issues are often considered technical sideshows."
Instead, Ali argues that environmental issues are central to national security and can be used “instrumentally to resolve disputes,” he says. “This is a way to enlarge the pie, so you could potentially have greater opportunities for cooperation because the environment is, in many ways, an issue of common aversion -- if it gets destroyed, everyone suffers.”
“If you don’t have the environment, what do you have to protect?” Ali asks.
The conference will explore three topics that parallel the new institute’s main areas of research: borderlands, “pragmatic peace” and resource values. Within these themes, the conference will be arranged into five sessions, each of which is targeted towards developing a product ranging from edited volumes to new educational websites to video documentaries.
“This is not just a conference,” Ali says, “but a launching point for research.”
Other highlights of the conference include a screening of the film Fambul Tok, about post-conflict resolution in Sierra Leone; panel discussions on diplomacy in the polar regions and on conservation and energy in Eurasia; visiting environmental artists from Cuba; sessions on negotiating treaties around hazardous pollutants and on ecological approaches to improving the African Union.
The keynote speakers on Saturday, Oct. 22 will be Colonel Tom O'Donovan, a former commander in Afghanistan and Tariq Banuri, director emeritus of the U.N.’s sustainable development division.
“We’re going to be looking at these big international issues where the environment is linked to conflict and diplomacy and scientific issues,” says Ali, “and then we’re going to be zooming in to look at local manifestations of that same dynamic.”
To that end, on Sunday the conference will end with a cruise on Lake Champlain that explores environmental diplomacy issues in this region. The cruise keynote speaker will be Deb Markowitz, secretary of Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources.
Register for the conference and lake cruise online. For more information, please email Rebecca Pincus at rpincus1@uvm.edu.
Participants may also register online for a two-day preconference, “Ecodiplomacy Academy,” Oct. 20-21.