As the River Jordan meanders between Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, disease-causing microbes that thrive in water contaminated with sewage pass over geopolitical lines without passports or border checks. By drinking or bathing in that contaminated water, children on each side of the border get sick. But proposed solutions could provide an opportunity to heal more than just disease. Cross-border investment in water treatment can be a mechanism for brokering peace. This is the kind of thinking behind environmental peacebuilding, a new discipline in natural-resource management that stems from a growing realization that although natural resources can fuel conflict, they can also provide a focus for cooperation. Over the past 60 years, according to a 2009 United Nations (UN) report, 40 percent of conflicts between nations or states have links to disagreements over natural resources. With demand for resources increasing alongside the number of people inhabiting planet Earth, compounded by stressors such as climate change, conflicts are expected to intensify. Water quality in the River Jordan, whose waters cross the international boundaries of Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, has been compromised by the inputs of untreated sewage, leading to health problems but also opportunities for grassroots cross-border collaboration on water treatment and habitat restoration. Photograph: David Bjorgen. As an area of research focus, environmental peacebuilding took root in the early 1990s, explains Geoffrey Dabelko, a senior advisor at the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, and Director of the Environmental Studies Program at the Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs at Ohio University. “The end of the Cold War created the space and debates in security policy and scholarship to consider topics like environment, health, and poverty within a war-and-peace context in ways that had not occurred much before,” Dabelko says. There was a push to understand how natural resources played into security concerns, particularly with respect to scarcity or abundance. Villagers in Nepal often must share water resources with India, leading to conflict and the need for peacebuilding. Photograph: Florian Krampe. This new field of study recognizes that environmental dimensions ignore political boundaries—whether these boundaries are between nations or communities. As is explained by Ken Conca in his 2002 book Environmental Peacemaking, coauthored with Dabelko, environmental peacebuilding turns the premise of ecological insecurity on its head. “Rather than asking whether environmental degradation can trigger broader forms of intergroup violent conflict, we ask whether environmental cooperation can trigger broader forms of peace.” Florian Krampe, a researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in Sweden, has studied whether there may have been lost opportunities for environmental peacebuilding during the conflict in Kosovo, the disputed borderland between Serbia and Albania. In Kosovo, “water wasn’t a central issue,” says Krampe. But because of the conflict in Kosovo, the UN took over the responsibilities of running the state after 1999. The UN administered not just politically but in terms of the utilities service sector, including the direction of water treatment. But, Krampe wonders, might there instead have been opportunities to use the water sector to facilitate cooperation between Serbs and Albanians in North Kosovo? The way it played out, says Krampe, is that the only water reservoir in the North was controlled by the Serbs whereas the only treatment plant was in Albanian territory. “So whoever would have switched off the water would have not got water in return,” he says. This could have been an opportunity to facilitate cooperation between different actors. The problem was technical, but in a postconflict situation, the issues to be resolved are not only technical—they are political, he explains. His research on this issue, published in Cooperation and Conflict, outlines why outsourcing the problem-solving was problematic. Rather than have the two parties resolve the problem directly, UN agencies consolidated the water governance structures, avoided difficult issues instead of engaging in conflict resolution, and undermined local involvement, Krampe writes. “If you have a problem with water at home, you call a plumber, not a political scientist,” he says. But as he explains, one challenge of environmental peacebuilding in practice is that the theoretical links among natural resources, environmental cooperation, and peace are poorly understood. That is a sentiment echoed by others, including Ashok Swain, professor of peace and conflict research; UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) chair of International Water Cooperation; and the director of the Research School of International Water Cooperation at Uppsala University, in Sweden. Swain has studied environmental peacebuilding in South Asia, examining conflicts over water on the Indus River shared by India and Pakistan, for example, and the Mahakali River shared by India and Nepal. He wonders, “If you are collaborating over the water, you are collaborating over the forest, or you are collaborating over the land, will that also lead to other forms of collaboration?” Swain says there is a need for more comparative studies and a maturation of theoretical knowledge. Environmental peacebuilding has taken off quite well on the policy side, but is lacking on the academic side, he says. Nevertheless, finding theoretical guidance is tricky in a field fraught with so much complexity and so many variables. What has been learned so far is that “the golden principle is not to have a golden principle,” he says. And the approach of using case studies rather than comparative studies is hard to avoid when different areas have different resources and politics. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has been a region of violent conflict for decades. “Resource conflicts are as old as the Congo,” says Johannes Refisch, an ecologist with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), who heads the Great Ape Survival Partnership for the conservation of chimps, gorillas, bonobos, and orangutans. “Since the midtwentieth century, the 34 most biologically diverse regions on the planet have been the site of 81 percent of the world's major armed conflicts,” write Refisch and coauthor Johann Jenson in a 2016 chapter on transboundary collaboration for gorilla conservation. The DRC is one of those highly biodiverse conflict regions. As Refisch explains, for critically endangered species such as the mountain gorilla, with a limited range that spans borders between Rwanda, DRC, and Uganda, “the animals don’t have passports, and poachers cross borders, gorillas cross borders, and a lot of threats have a transboundary angle.” In addition to its richness in biodiversity, the habitats where gorillas make their homes are also rich in oil and minerals such as gold, making for conflicts between conservation and extractive industries. Virunga National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site in eastern DRC on the border of Uganda and Rwanda, is home to one-quarter of the world's mountain gorillas, alongside forest elephants, okapis, hippos, more than 50 species of freshwater fish, and numerous rare birds. In the DRC, during clashes between 2003 and 2007, some 1.3 million people were killed directly or indirectly by the region's armed conflict, including more than 150 park rangers. But despite recurring and bloody conflicts, cross-border cooperation for the conservation of gorillas continued. “Even though that was a difficult period, we managed to bring the technical people together,” Refisch says. Even with the high-level political impasse and lack of dialogue, at a lower level, antipoaching patrols continued on both sides of the border. An Eastern lowland gorilla in Kahuzi-Biéga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, near the border with Rwanda. Gorillas freely cross international boundaries, but conserving this endangered species has been challenging amid violent conflict within and between countries in the region. Photograph: Johannes Refisch. Despite the region's ongoing violent civil unrest, the downward spiral of the mountain gorilla, at least for now, has been reversed. The population appears to be on an upswing. “We still have the gorillas, which is kind of a miracle,” says Refisch. Nevertheless, violence continues, and park guards continue to be killed. Refisch is continuing to work with conflict-resolution teams in other sensitive and biodiversity-rich areas of the DRC, such as in Kahuzi Biéga-National Park. There, community-conservation committees trained in conflict resolution were deployed to facilitate dialogue between national park managers and the local community. This, explains Refisch, led to a long but finally successful process in which illegal settlers voluntarily left an ecologically important and sensitive corridor, where rehabilitation measures are taking place. But not all are convinced that cooperation over natural resources and the stimulation, sustenance, or restoration of peace—especially in parks adjacent to or spanning international boundaries—can be causally linked. Karina Barquet, who has studied peace parks in several transborder regions, highlights that in the Virunga region, there has been a lot of funding and a lot of international attention, more so than any other transboundary park or peace park in the world. With institutions in place, protection of species has worked. “But whether that has been a source of peacebuilding [is] difficult to say, because it's very difficult to prove,” she says. Establishing causality is a bigger and broader problem in the field of environmental peacebuilding, says Barquet, a research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute. An abundance of literature suggests that peace parks have, at best, failed to address the peacebuilding aspect and, at worst, further strained relationships at local and regional levels, she explains. “In my own research, I have not come across a paper that, with evidence, can back up the claim that a peace park can establish peace,” she says. She has intensively studied Si-A-Paz (Yes to Peace) Park in Central America, spanning the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. The park, established in 1990 and incorporating 11 protected areas, is located in an area where the border has been disputed for over a century, at times with armed conflict and militarization inside the park. At the time of the park's establishment, Nicaragua had emerged from civil war, and the border where the park was established had been a hideout for rebels. As Barquet writes in her 2017 paper in Geoforum, “Si-A-Paz was touted as one of the most biodiverse places in Central America,” and its creation was intended, officially, to strengthen cooperation on environmental issues and improve control of the borderland, which was hoped would translate into improved regional and international cooperation. But something not often recognized by conservationists, suggests Barquet, is that when you establish a park, you also need to enforce rules and have more surveillance. Creating a park in an area that had not been previously controlled by the state provided a convenient excuse to establish previously nonexistent surveillance over a disputed area, according to Barquet. The park was established with a lot of financing for the first 3 years, but then another border conflict broke out, which froze relations and progress. The Sarapiqui River, whose water course joins the San Juan River shared by Costa Rica and Nicaragua, is in the Si-A-Paz region designated as a peace park in 1990. The park has been fraught with conflict since its establishment, as has been explored in the research of Karina Barquet. Photograph: m.prinke. When the conflict ended, cooperation never really picked up again, she explains. Disagreements over dredging and navigation of the San Juan River, plans for canal construction, unmapped territory, border delimitation, pollution, fisheries, and road construction through fragile ecosystems led to further conflict and a series of disputes between the two countries, some of which were brought before the International Court of Justice. Through Barquet's analysis of interviews, as well as informal conversations and focus-group discussions with 58 community members, representatives of nongovernmental organizations, researchers, government staff, and local authorities on both sides of the border in the park region, she discovered that some people were unaware of the park's existence; that funding for the park's development was not trickling down to local communities; and that maps of the area identifying oil wells, approved by Costa Rica's government in 1996, geographically overlapped with protected areas. Barquet concludes that in the case of Si-A-Paz, the park has helped to “strengthen conflict rather than foster peace.” The peacebuilding outcome of transboundary parks should not be assumed, she argues. “[Parks] are more likely to succeed if they have mechanisms in their institutional frameworks that clearly address peacebuilding and conflict management in their design.” Another park with an interesting history is Waterton–Glacier Peace Park, spanning the border between Alberta, Canada, and Montana. The world's first international peace park, it celebrates the long-term peace between the United States and Canada, and it recognizes a shared ecosystem, although it was not born of a conflict, Dabelko explains. Nevertheless, whether or not it fosters “peace” is unclear when you look at the state versus affected peoples. “Our American conception is that parks are places where people do not live and do not gather items for their own sustenance, and that is not the way that indigenous peoples like the Blackfeet and other tribes that use that area had gone about their business for millennia before that park structure was imposed on them,” says Len Broberg, director of the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Montana. The Blackfeet Nation were displaced from their ancestral lands within park boundaries even before the establishment of Glacier National Park (before the peace park), as were other indigenous groups who lived in or traveled through the region. “For 100 years, there's been a lot of dissension and conflict, and feelings of oppression in terms of the Blackfeet Tribe… so there's definitely some animosity,” says one Blackfeet community member who did not wish to be named. In the Agreement of 1895, there is explicit recognition of Blackfeet reserve rights in the park. But even after several legal challenges by the Blackfeet, the realization of those disputed rights has been slow and incomplete. (Left) Blackfeet tipis near Waterton–Glacier Peace Park. Although the park was established to celebrate the long history of peace between the United States and Canada, the displacement and reduced resource access by the four groups of the Blackfeet Confederacy and other indigenous communities have been the sources of a longstanding conflict that is just beginning to be addressed. (Right) Timber harvest in a British Columbia watershed bordering the peace park. Photographs: Len Broberg. Over the last 5 to 10 years, however, the tenuous relationship between the park and indigenous people has begun to change. Under the current Glacier Park Superintendent, “there has been an incremental shift in the relationship between the Park Service and the Blackfeet Tribe as a government, in terms of more communication,” says this Blackfeet member, and more examples of the Park Service recognizing the Blackfeet as a potential partner with an important stake in the park. Going forward, he sees the recognition of tribal voices in protected places representing an important opportunity. Barquet K. 2015. “Yes to Peace?” Environmental peacemaking and transboundary conservation in Central America. Geoforum 63: 14–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.05.011 Bruch C, Muffett C, Nichols S, eds. 2016. Governance, Natural Resources, and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding. Routledge. Conca K, Dabelko G. 2002. Environmental Peacemaking. Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Environmental Security and Sustaining Peace. SDG Academy. (15 December 2017; https://courses.sdgacademy.org/learn/environmental-security-and-sustaining-peace-march-2018) Krampe F. 2017. Toward sustainable peace: A new research agenda for post-conflict natural resource management. Global Environmental Politics 17: 1–8. According to Lauren Alley, a management assistant at Glacier National Park, “The park collaborates with the Blackfeet on a number of topics and initiatives including the species and There is also and that for all park development that with Blackfeet she explained critically for to to work on or and Blackfeet reserve rights in the park, I a long way from says Broberg, come a long way from when the park was established to says director and of environmental at Blackfeet Environmental there's still a lot more that we will have to work at to get to where we need to be as far as is that the of Waterton–Glacier Park will be more for all including indigenous of the for the National Glacier that the peace park was not established to peace but rather to celebrate and something that of peace. Nevertheless, they did end up created this and a where people were to a that clearly was he says. the border between the United States and to the world's “The look through and they and they understand and they on in the and the look and a of and have who the of British Columbia is who he says. 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Lesley Evans Ogden (2018) studied this question.