Abstract

Part of book
The Political Economy of Climate Finance: Lessons from International Development

Abstract

The role and impacts of climate finance on peace and security in conflict-affected and fragile contexts—many of which are also vulnerable to climate change rank among the lowest recipients of climate finance—is an area still little investigated by either the climate finance, climate security or environmental peacebuilding fields. A recent UNDP report (2021) with the Climate Security Mechanism and the Nataij Group argues for the need to better understand peace co-benefits. This chapter attempts to fill this void, highlighting that greater attention is needed to the allocation, access and thus distribution, quality and quantity of finance, and therein, the design of climate finance mechanisms and their inherent impacts on equity in conflict-affected and fragile contexts. This chapter examines, synthetically, but non-exhaustively, the literature and underlying arguments from the emerging fields of climate finance, climate security and environmental peacebuilding and the application of a co-benefits approach to strengthen policy coherence, before considering learnings from nascent practice, including the efforts of the UN system. It identifies gaps for further investigation and key guiding principles on the measurement of peace and security co-benefits or dividends of climate finance and draws conclusions from a new meta-analysis by UNDP (2021) and advocates for a transdisciplinary approach (Lawrence et al., One Earth 5:44–61, 2022; Rigolot, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 7:1–5, 2020). As one of the first attempts to systematically consider climate finance in climate vulnerable conflict-affected and fragile contexts, it argues that better metrics accounting for peace co-benefits or dividends, reinventing Theories of Change, and establishing intersectoral Communities of Practices and special vehicles/calls for proposals could strengthen access and outcomes.