By Karishma Goswami
Supported and Edited by Annika Erickson-Pearson
Environmental peacebuilding is evolving, responding to a changing geopolitical context and declining prioritization of peace and environmental measures. And the topics that practitioners are highlighting in their research and outreach reflect that evolution, too. The Path to Ottawa, an event series hosted by the Environmental Peacebuilding Association (for which the Environmental Law Institute serves as the secretariat) and various stakeholders in 2025 and 2026 explored the environmental impacts of conflict and strategies to strengthen environmental peacebuilding. Themes emerged across the series that revealed a shift toward more local and specialized topics.
Weakening multilateral institutions and declining prioritization of environmental peacebuilding efforts globally, established as trends during the EnPAx Year in Review and Year Ahead webinar, is encouraging both the critical examination of existing frameworks and the identification of alternative legal tools. During the session, “After COP30: Securing Peace in a Warming World,” Gabriel Lagrange highlighted that climate change is “reshaping geopolitical realities, deepening vulnerabilities, and influencing the very prospect of peace and security across the world.” Noting that within this context, “the climate, peace, and security nexus has struggled to find consistent recognition within the formal United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) processes.” The speakers go on to analyze how peace and security were addressed in discussions before, during, and after COP30, identifying opportunities to strengthen security dialogues within existing frameworks. Beyond examining established processes, it is also essential to critically examine emerging tools. In “A Close Look at the OTP-ICC Policy on Environmental Damage,” James Gondi applauded the International Criminal Court’s policy for being the “first systematic framework for environmental crime prosecution” and Daniella Dam-de Jong highlighted its ecocentric approach as innovative. However, Gondi emphasized some limitations of the policy including the fact that it doesn’t replace calls to recognize ecocide as a standalone crime, faces jurisdictional challenges in transboundary harms, and needs to be supplemented by active dissemination to avoid limited implementation. These sessions reflect the growing emphasis on critically evaluating frameworks both to recognize their limitations and find opportunities within constraint. And they reveal the adaptability required of practitioners to ensure effective implementation of emerging strategies within new contexts.
The erosion of top-down funding models, while challenging, is in some cases enabling grassroots action and generating greater integration of community and cultural perspectives in environmental peacebuilding strategies. During the session “Sulh for Soil: Integrating Islamic Peacemaking Principles in Modern FDR Practice”, speakers discussed land disputes related to inheritance within families where some members had emigrated from their homeland. Ibrahim Hussein and Wasif Majeed examined how Islamic dispute resolution, resolving disputes outside of legal frameworks through Islamic principles, can circumvent some of the fragmentation in relationships that result from court mediation. Though context-specific, speakers described its implementation across Canada, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom, recognizing the global application of the approach. Another session, “Nonviolent Strategies for Defending Indigenous Land in the Philippines, Indonesia and Bolivia,” brought grassroots leaders from three geopolitical regions together to discuss the challenges faced by their Indigenous communities and the strategies utilized to combat them. The session, though grounded in grassroots experience and strategies, lent to global applications as practitioners resonated with sentiments like that voiced by Dorthea Wabiser, “we can live without palm and sugar cane, but we cannot live without forest and land.” And, as Alex Villca emphasized, “these exchanges are essential to strengthen our strategies and learn from one another.” Despite what might seem at face value like a narrow focus on particular contexts, cultures, and communities, resonance across experiences and innovation born through interconnection demonstrates the global impact of grassroots action.
As the field narrows, strategies are becoming more tailored and context specific. The session, “Collaborating for Change: Research and Action on the Environmental Impacts of Conflict in Africa,” identified gaps in post-conflict recovery and conservation research across Africa. Underdocumentation of environmental harms limits the applicability of peacebuilding strategies, underscoring the importance of context-specific strategies. Beyond geographical contexts, the field is also recognizing the disproportionate impacts that conflict and climate change have on different ecologies. During “Forest Conservation: From Conflict to Peace” Rowan Alusiola highlighted that while “forest conservation programs … have aggravated or created conflict because communities have been restricted from access of forest and forest resources,” they can also “bring diverse groups together to rethink existing perspectives.” Rather than constricting the field, this shift towards adapting global strategies to specific cultural and ecological contexts strengthens environmental peacebuilding as narrower applications may increase the resilience of initiatives.
A series of events within the Path to Ottawa, Peace Notes, focused on exploring environmental peacebuilding challenges and opportunities through the lens of art. Each session focused on a different aspect of nature (rocks, trees, oceans, and even whalesong) and invited art into the conversation to help participants make connections between nature and peace. One of the series coordinators, Annika Erickson-Pearson noted, “Art reminds us that peace is personal.” The Peace Notes series offered participants another set of tools and skills for environmental peacebuilding and opened the door to diverse actors and audiences.
By highlighting peacebuilding practitioners with varying specialties from around the world, the Path to Ottawa reveals how a changing geopolitical landscape is shaping the field. Across the themes that emerged from the series, there was one common thread: narrowing. For example, on the one hand, narrowing presents challenges: opportunities to address environment, peace, and conflict within formal frameworks are becoming more narrowly defined, top-down funding is eroding, and broad strategies are being replaced by context-specific approaches. Yet, on the other hand, narrowing presents an opportunity to strengthen the field by focusing on the most impactful tools, elevating previously excluded voices, providing space for the growth of grassroots action, and by supporting more resilient, long-term solutions.