 So I'd like to welcome everyone to this event, Global Opportunities for Strengthening Resource Security. This is the fourth event in the Frontier series that New America and USAID have convened as part of the Integrated Natural Resource Management Activity. It's such a pleasure to be with you today. And without further ado, I'd like to hand it over to Carol Boudreau, Senior Land Governance Advisor at USAID to provide some opening remarks. Carol. Well, a warm thank you to Yulia and to New America this morning, and welcome to all of you in person, what a brave group of people coming through as Yulia said, the apocalypse this morning in Washington, D.C. It is quite, in some ways it's really quite a timely event for us to have to address in Washington, D.C. I'm so pleased to have you here with us, and we're delighted to be with you in person, and we want to welcome everyone who's with us online. We're also so excited today to have the opportunity to share with you some of our thinking coming from USAID and USIP on the linkages that exist and that are quite strong between climate change, natural resources, and security or conflict issues. The relevance of this nexus is literally clear to us today looking out the window, and it's only going to continue to grow as the impacts of a change in climate are felt not only on our lungs and our eyes, but most importantly on our livelihoods, on our shelter, on our housing opportunities, on issues like migration, and so many other aspects of our lives and the lives of people living around the world. We also recognize that the failure to understand, assess, and address these threats, it will contribute to conflict between people, between communities, and between governments. Additionally, we recognize that careful attention to these threats in some contexts has the potential to support climate resilience, peace building, and other development objectives, and those might include things like food security, water security, and effective land and resource governance. And here's the important part, finding those opportunities to promote peace and security and resilience while at the same time mitigating conflict and risk of conflict. That's why we're here. Each one of the toolkits we're going to talk about today will provide insights around those issues. We are so excited today to have Tegan Blaine, the Director of Climate Environment and Con— the Climate Environment and Conflict Program at the U.S. Institute for Peace, with us along with Peter Bergen from New America, they're going to be talking to us about how attending to the nexus between climate resourcing and security can help to improve our responses to a change in climate and as well to promote a just transition. I'm personally delighted, like sincerely, I'm personally delighted, that we will have a chance today to dig into programming options and approaches that USAID and other donors can take because we'll be drawing on three either new or newly revised toolkits that USAID has created to address the linkages. Once again, my baby land in conflict as well, water in conflict and food security and conflict. We are so grateful to New America for hosting us today and we're grateful to be with all of you. So without further ado, let me take a moment and introduce Mr. Peter Bergen, best-selling author, Emmy-nominated documentary producer, noted journalist and podcaster, in addition vice president of global studies and fellows here at New America, he is going to kick off the event for us today, leading a fireside chat with Tegan Blaine. Peter and Tegan, over to you. Thank you very much. So first of all, I'd like to tell you a little bit more about Dr. Tegan Blaine. She's the director of climate environment and conflict at the United U.S. Institute of Peace. Before that, she worked as vice president on climate change initiatives at the National Geographic Society. She worked at USAID for a long period in Africa. Before that, she worked at McKinsey and helped also at the State Department as a policy advisor on water. Her doctorate is in oceanography and climate from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and in very interestingly, she has a bachelor's degree in comparative literature and mathematical ecology from Brown. So thank you for talking with us today. Let's first of all talk about competition and conflict over natural resources. What are we talking about? Well, first off, I would love to be able to say, Peter, thank you so much for inviting me here today and for the opportunity to be talking with you about such important issues. You know, natural resources are absolutely critical to human security. They really contribute to food security, water security, all of the things that we rely on just to be able to live. And so I can pull out a ton of examples where there's conflicts over those resources. But I would say that the really important thing to remember is it's really about human beings being able to have the resources they need in order to be able to live their lives. Just as a couple of examples, one of the areas that USIP is currently working on conflict over natural resources is around land issues in northern Nigeria. It's an area where there's been quite a bit of conflict between pastoralist populations and farmers who live in that area, with pastoralist populations being forced into new areas by encroaching agriculture and not necessarily being able to follow some of the pathways that they have traditionally relied on to access grasslands and water. And so there's been increasing conflict between agricultural populations that is sometimes assumed to be more about religious differences and cultural differences than just about land issues and land tenure. You know, I think another important example about land is actually the case of Kenya right now. Kenya has tried to do enormous investments into wind energy, but they are finding that communities are quite resistant to some of the implementation. In part because the land that is scheduled to be used for implementation of wind energy is productive land, and people don't always have clear tenure to that land. Those communities are also communities who don't have access to electricity, and so when they see their land being taken away for wind energy, they're losing access to productive land. And also they're concerned about access to the benefits that are being generated. And so protests against implementation of wind energy have actually caused the Kenyan government to lose millions of dollars of private sector investment. You know, there are other examples that are quite relevant as well. A couple of years ago, because of conflict over irrigation water, there was a conflict between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan that resulted in 40 people dead and 30,000 people displaced. We can bring up the GERD dam in Ethiopia. There's cobalt in the DRC, lithium in South America. These are critical minerals for the development of green technologies. There are so many instances of conflict over natural resources. And just about 10 days ago, there were border clashes between Iran and the Taliban, specifically about water, which led to a number of people dying. You mentioned cobalt in the Congo, in the DRC. My impression is the Chinese have more or less completely monopolized the market and conditions in these cobalt mines are really appalling in general. Have the Chinese sort of, I mean, is there a continue to be conflict over cobalt? Or have the Chinese sort of won that particular effort in the Congo? You know, that's a good question and I'm not fully up to date on that. You know, one thing that I would say, though, is the transition to a new economy, a modern economy that relies on green energy is absolutely critical for the world to achieve its goals in terms of climate change. Moving to a green economy reduces greenhouse gas emissions and actually approves outcomes globally. And so I think that there's wide recognition that private sector companies will need access to critical minerals that are going to be important for creating batteries, inputs into solar energy, all sorts of different needs. And so it's not necessarily the private sector that's the problem. They play an important, a very important role in terms of innovation and providing investment that is helping move the entire world towards a green economy. However, when we're talking about something like mining, I think that there have traditionally been major problems with mining over land issues, you know, forcing indigenous people off lands, issues related to pollution of water resources and land resources that have resulted in significant cancer rates and other health issues. You know, there are labor practices and other issues there. And so we do need to think about better ways to productively mine that really centers the needs of the communities affected by the mining. And we also need to think about the geopolitical ramifications in this space as well and kind of, you know, a higher level competition over control of resources that are going to be critical for developing the types of technologies that all of us around the world will depend upon. This iPhone is completely dependent on cobalt. And so I noticed that Apple said that they will be only using recycled cobalt starting in 2025 because of this specific issue around the conditions in places like Congo. But just one more question on sort of critical minerals. I mean, you know, there's sort of paradox about the Green Revolution, which is many of the things that are going to make electric vehicles, electric vehicles, whether they're critical minerals like cobalt or rare earths or other kinds of minerals, you know, these minerals, you know, they're dispersed in places that aren't necessarily in the United States and the U.S. has much higher standards around mining than say the Chinese would. So how do you kind of encourage the right kind of environmentalism in terms of electric vehicles while not also damaging the environment of places like the Congo or other places? Yeah. You know, I think we do need to remember that mining does provide critical development opportunities. It's a source of income to many of these countries that tend to be very poor countries and a source of jobs as well. You know, it's a tough development issue. And I really appreciate that USAID released a report, I believe, in fall of 2022, looking at where a lot of critical minerals are, where the large amounts of them and discovering that many of them are in fragile countries, many of them in countries where USAID infests. And so it does raise a question about the role of development organizations like USAID and the role of local governments in ensuring that we benefit from the investment in mining and minimize the risks of mining. And I think that there's a lot to be said for the responsibilities of development practitioners as well as government as well as the private sector. You know, the fact that USAID is putting out these kinds of tool kids to help work with communities around addressing the risks of conflict and getting ahead of the curve is absolutely critical and is one way that USAID can help communities benefit from these investments while also trying to minimize the risks of conflict and to think about how to encourage mining to be done in ways that really take into account the needs of communities and the desires of communities in substantive ways, not just doing consultations and then dismissing those consultations, but actually giving some of the power to the communities to determine their own future and what that means about mining practices. Switching gears a bit to climate change, to what extent is climate change going to drive conflict and how do these tool kits provide some pathways to manage those risks? That's a really good question. I think that there are a couple of things that I would point out about climate change. Number one, climate change is, as we all know and are beginning to experience even in Washington, DC, climate change is really changing patterns of temperature, patterns of rainfall, patterns of extreme events, sea level rise, wind patterns, all sorts of environmental variables and that is going to impact the quantity and the quality of a variety of resources. Water is key among them. We're seeing that areas that regularly had steady rainfall, small amounts over a variety of days, are now seeing that they're going without rainfall for weeks and then when rain comes, it's heavy, it washes away soil, it doesn't have the time to sink into the soil. And so already we're seeing climate change have impacts on the availability of key resources and that's a risk for conflict as communities are finding that the resources that they depend on are depleted. You know, the other issue that we need to talk about is how policy, how the way we are trying to address climate change is also going to lead to conflict and really try to get ahead of the curb. You know, the UN FCCC's work on climate change has really set very ambitious targets and, you know, we talk a lot about green energy and improved land management practices as contributing to those targets. In that kind of international forum, we rarely talk about what the pathways look like to get there. You know, at USIP, we've done some work on decarbonization, for example, and the risks that countries that are often fragile countries with weak governance systems face as we look at the potential for, you know, the use of fossil fuels to go down and so demand for what they're offering to go down. We need to think about some of the conflicts with the transition to wind energy. We need to think about those minerals. And so we, in my opinion, we need to work at the community level to manage some of the likelihoods of conflicts, whether that's dealing with reduced water, for example, that communities rely on or whether it's dealing with mining. But we also need to work at higher policy levels to get ahead of this and really think about what we can do at the global level to ensure that the pathways towards the future that we're looking at are as peaceful and conflict-free as possible. You mentioned weak governments. I was recently in Iraq and, you know, Iraq has a pretty weak government for obvious reasons. And, you know, the temperatures in summer and Baghdad are now 50 degrees centigrade or 120 degrees Fahrenheit routinely. And when Iraqi government officials talk about climate change, they all say, yeah, we have a big problem. It's not about curbing climate change. It's about mitigating the effects that we know we're going to face. But there's a collective action problem. And, you know, you mentioned weak governments. They, I mean, in a lot of places that are going to be most affected, for instance, Pakistan, which is, you know, obviously, these terrible floods, which were related to climate change, you know, they have very weak governments. So how do you address the issue of where the effects of climate change are going to be the worst is often the place with some of the weakest governments? You know, I don't know what the solution there is. It's a really, really tough one. And, you know, especially big in this audience, which is focused on USAID toolkits, you know, USAID has been doing an enormous amount of work over them over many, many years on governance issues. And I think being able to integrate, you know, more awareness of some of the risks in communities into the work that they do on governance is one important approach for what USAID can be doing. But, you know, we're facing really tough challenges. Some of the work that our tough researchers have done on decarbonization show that when there's rapid decarbonization, these governments that are heavily reliant on rents from fossil fuels and have political systems that are set up that rely heavily on those rents, they're not very democratic by any stretch of the imagination. And there is a very short window sometimes when there is an opportunity to shift those governments towards more democratic processes. There's an opportunity for communities to come together and really insist on more engagement with governments. That opportunity is often very, very limited before those kinds of systems often find replacements for the rents lost when fossil fuel production either dropped suddenly or their sales dropped suddenly and find other ways to maintain the existing status quo of governments that are heavily reliant on, you know, corruption and, you know, other sources of power. And so I think it raises questions about when we can intervene in these areas to encourage movements towards stronger governance systems that can really deliver services for its people, which are more responsive to community needs and community input. You know, it's going to take quite a bit of effort to really take advantage of those opportunities when they happen and think about how we can help those governments move in ways that will allow them to serve their communities more effectively. So how do societies safeguard against resource competition spilling over into conflict and violence? Who's responsible for doing this and what are some successful approaches to mitigating risks? That also is a really good question. You know, as I said before, I think that there are certain responsibilities that sit with the private sector who's doing investment and doing it responsible for innovation. There are responsibilities that sit with governments. There are responsibilities among donors. There are also responsibilities that we should all undertake at the global policy level. Where to start, you know? I think, you know, especially with governments, there is a real need to understand better how governments can be more responsive to local communities. And part of that has happened with devolution and putting more power in local governments. However, many of those governments struggle because they don't have a lot of technical capacity to actually provide the kinds of services that people need. But at least that devolution of power seats a lot of decisions closer to where communities are interacting with government. There's also a real need to build more trust between governments and people, to engage on a regular basis. You know, I can't tell you how many communities I went into when I was working for USAID, where communities had virtually no engagement with their local governments. And local governments didn't honestly know how to engage with local communities. And so building opportunities for government officials to engage more regularly with the communities they serve and to hear from them and to actually have an opportunity to respond to those concerns is really critical as well. A program I'm familiar with is the one in Afghanistan, which was a relatively inexpensive program called the National Solidarity Program. And it did precisely what you said, which is it asked local villagers, what project do you want to do? And, you know, rather than sort of saying this is the project, we're going to tell you what to do. And they would vote on it. And the project would be $30,000 or something. It wasn't. But it was quite a successful approach to what you're describing. Right now we're seeing the largest number of humans migrating at any other point in history. And how does that play into everything we've sort of been discussing? Another good question, Peter. You know, one of the things that we've been working on at USIP is kind of the trying to get to a better understanding of how climate and environmental change is likely to drive people towards urban areas. When a lot of those people arrive in urban areas, they're arriving in, you know, the outskirts of city, they're finding areas that are not necessarily the nicest areas. Many of these are in environmentally fragile areas, you know, they're landing in flood zones, they're landing on steep slopes that are not amenable to farming but are very vulnerable to landslides, things like that. And so, you know, there's a possibility of increased stresses on land and water. But then there's also the likelihood of competition over other resources that aren't perhaps natural resources, but are resources that governments provide. Access to transportation, access to health services or access to education. Many urban governments are not necessarily able to deal with the influx of people in ways that are responsive to their needs. And also long-term residents of cities often view people coming into those cities as interlopers, as people who, you know, they're not the urban citizens, are they, you know, are they going to be, what's the risk to the resources that I already get from urban governments, for example. And so, we really do need to think about how to get ahead of that curve. Many of these people who are moving are looking for better opportunities. There's a reason that they're moving, and there's a lot of positive that comes out of moving, but we do need to think about how to build a social cohesion so that those people are welcomed into communities. And we really do need to tackle some of the urban issues around urban areas that aren't able to move fast enough, urban areas that are fractured so that you're looking at multiple governmental structures over a wider urban area that don't necessarily cooperate together. That we need to look to informal institutions and work with them because they may be closer to communities that they can help represent. You know, those kinds of issues are going to be critical in the future so that we can support people who are choosing to move and to look for better opportunities. I mean, an example of this sort of negative feedback loop that I'm familiar with is in Baghdad, where, so climate change is forcing farmers to move into the city. The city, it isn't very functional already. The increased population is reducing the amount of green space in the city so that you have this sort of negative feedback loop where the effects of climate change are now even worse in Baghdad. Do you have a sense of, in terms of climate change refugees, is there a number that exists of what the percentage of obviously the refugees are fleeing war but do you have a sense of the scale of the problem? You know, there's been quite a bit of work done by the World Bank and other institutions to try to get at estimates of how many people will be on the move by 2050 or 2070. The numbers are staggering and I think that it's important to recognize that there are already many people on the move because of environmental catastrophes of one kind or the other. And certainly there are numbers, you know, regularly generated on the number of people who are on the, you know, displaced because of environmental catastrophes versus displaced by war and so on. I'm really bad at numbers and I can't actually give you, you know, numbers straight out of my head for any particular region of the world. But you know, I really do think that it's going to be a growing problem and the actual number matters a lot less than the overall trends. We have long talked about, for example, the need to pay attention to small island developing states who are facing, you know, really catastrophic sea level rise that is, you know, devastating land or reclaiming land and so on. But we also need to be paying attention to enormous areas of the world that are facing significant temperature increases and will make huge swaths of the world unsustainable for human life as we know it. Where are those people going to go? That's millions and millions and millions of people. Okay, go ahead. All the people who are moving and migrating and all the parts of the world where it's going to be unsustainable, not only are the people moving but all the resources that we depend on in a globalized kind of planet, right? We've been getting resources from all around the world and depending on resources from all around the world, those resources are going to be gone too, right? So I was thinking about, you know, the growth of these mega cities and how are we feeding these people? Where's this food coming from? If people are moving to the cities and there's nobody in the rural, are we, is it vertical farming? What's the thinking on that? You know, I think that raises a lot of really critical questions about where we're going to get the innovation that contributes to things like that. You know, in the 1970s and early 1980s there was an enormous amount of agricultural innovation that significantly increased the amount of productivity on various land. And so again, this is an area where private sector investment is going to be absolutely critical to figure out how to do these kinds of things, how to drive efficiencies that will help feed people, that will help ensure, you know, quantities of water and so on. And so there's a lot of scope for innovation and a real need for it. But I don't know how we're going to do that yet. Hello, Boca Cham. I work for Tetra Tech. A question that I would like to raise and hear your view is the coexistence, if I can call it, between large-scale mining and small-scale mining in many countries, especially if you look at West Africa or even Central Africa, where if you talk about cobalt, you talk about the trees and you talk about gold. Most of the gold, most of, I mean, a lot of gold comes from small-scale mining, but you also have industrial mining, actually, mining gold. And what we've seen in some of these countries right now is in some places you have small-scale miners, actually, invading, actually, the concentration of large-scale miners, actually. And it's a very complicated issue because some of these artisanal miners, they are either migrants or local miners, actually, to tell an artisanal miner who has been mining for, like, generation after generation, stop mining and go do something else, it's not relevant. So we have these kind of issues that we are facing right now and trying to address them. I don't know what's your take on that kind of challenge. Thank you. You know, it's a really complicated issue and there is a researcher, and I'm blanking out on her name at the moment, I can look her up for you because she's done some really incredible work on the evolution of environmental impact assessments and kind of policies of national governments around those kinds of requirements for mining operations that have ended up giving preference to large mining operations that can meet environmental requirements whereas small local mining operations can't do that. And so, you know, you begin to see them being driven out of business because they can't meet the environmental requirements that are being required for mining that larger companies are able to figure out how to meet but smaller operations are not able to do. I think that there's a need for a real balance in thinking about how we ensure that major mining corporations are meeting good environmental practices while also ensuring that there's a place for community-run operations and community mining where people are truly gaining income, gaining employment, you know, gaining from those operations. And I don't know what the right path is between this balance between some of the goods that come out of mining in terms of jobs and income as well as some of the environmental risks that those mines could potentially be responsible for. But I do think we need to think about it and kind of understand the greater complexity of those kinds of situations and be able to think more, to not assume that there's a blanket answer, to be more respectful of the complexity of those kinds of things and be willing to think a bit more about, you know, how some of what major operations could bring also compares to the importance of local operations as well. I don't think we fully thought through the complexities of those kinds of decisions. Go ahead. Good morning. But how come you can hear me? Yeah. Yes, I'm Barbara McKellen. I'm a work for the Danish Refugee Council as global advisor on housing land and property issues. So DRC is a humanitarian organization. But as you know, more and more the discussions on the nexus between humanitarian development and peace actors and how to support durable solutions. So in your opinion, and you know, more and more also we talk about integrated programming, how to link discussions on tenure security of land with activities such as livelihood, economic recovery. So where do you see that some humanitarian actors could support, you know, without being development actors, how can we link up to people who have your resources, your experience? For example, these toolkits, can they be used by humanitarian organizations or is it more geared toward development actors? You know, in the environmental peace building field, we talk a lot both about where there are conflicts specifically over environmental resources, but we also talk about some of the opportunities that are raised to build collaboration and build trust around environmental issues. And I think that that's where many humanitarian organizations can fit in, you know, there's immediate response to disasters and conflict and then there's a long-term development response. But as people begin to come home after a conflict, there are huge opportunities there. You know, the majority of combatants come home and enter farming in a lot of areas. There are issues about water. There's often in during conflict, there's a destruction of local decision-making entities and ways that, you know, decisions about resources are made. How can humanitarian organizations that are helping people move back to areas, for example, actually support the development of new ways of making decisions around water resources or about land, for example? Is there an opportunity there as people come home to actually start to build trust between different groups and really enable them to start building the structure structures, maybe skill sets, maybe it is smaller institutions to actually resolve some of those differences and plot a way forward for their community? You know, I think Daniel will be speaking later and I think he has experience, for example, in Northern Uganda looking at how water can be used as a way to begin to bring communities together where people coming back to areas, you know, there's no longer those historical decision-making entities set up any longer, that's been destroyed. And so as people come back, are there ways to start building those kinds of conflict resolution entities or pathways again? And beginning to think how to use those opportunities is one real, really great opening, in my opinion. Okay, well, thank you very much again. Thank you. So good morning, all. Again, my name is David Alfer. I'm the Conflict and Violence Prevention Integrator with the Center for Conflict and Violence Prevention at USAID. I'm here with Daniel Abrahams, my colleague in the center, who's the Senior Climate Security Advisor, Nikki Benke, Program Specialist with USAID Center for Water Security, Sanitation and Hygiene, and Jesse Anderson, Senior Conflict Advisor with USAID Center for Resilience. So I'll give you just a quick couple of minutes to set the stage and then I'm gonna turn it over to these three with questions and hopefully we'll get some good ones from you as well. So as a community of people in the peace building field, we are often asked how to show where climate change has caused conflict. This is difficult, if not impossible. For one thing, it's just not that simple. Conflict is as complex as the human beings who take part in it. It always has complex causes and we can't point to just one and say, this is it and that'll be at the next time as well. Here's the thing though, in this case, our crystal bowl works just fine. Climate change is an ever-increasing threat to natural resources including water and land for a variety of reasons. Heat is increasing with a damaging effect on crops and livestock, not to mention people. This affects food security, among other things. Disasters like droughts and floods are becoming worse and more frequent and all of these dynamics are putting more people on the move and into contact with others who are in competition for the same dwindling resources. We've already gotten a couple of comments and questions on that, it's an important point. The growing weight of compounding dynamics puts ever-increasing strain on already fragile systems of security and governance. All of these things we have clear data on. None of them are inevitably causal on their own but they are all common contributors to conflict. If climate change is worsening, in turn worsening these factors, then conflict becomes more likely. Indeed, we're seeing this playing out globally as we speak and that's the bad news. The good news is in two parts. First is that having identified this snowball and its component parts, its working mechanisms. The collective we of the development, humanitarian and peace-building communities have an opportunity to do something about it. There's a window that's still open. The second part is that each of these points of potential conflict also contains opportunity and our panelists will speak to that as well. Because we're describing a very complex and interconnected set of dynamics, it's critical that we find ways to integrate the various streams of USAID's work so that our own thought and practice matches the lived reality as much as possible. Excuse me, to that end, these three panelists here are from different but interconnected sections of USAID who will talk through both the problems and the opportunities, both of which, and I see many copies of it in the audience here, are contained within the toolkits that we're here to talk about. So I'll turn it over to them now with a few questions to start things off. For all of you, I'd like to start by asking the same question that Peter had asked Tegan in the fireside chat, but would like for each of you to answer it from the vantage point of where you sit within USAID. When we talk about competition and conflict over natural resources, what are we talking about? How and where is this manifesting in each of your work streams? And I will take moderator's privilege to be completely arbitrary and just start from one side to the other. So Jesse? Yeah, very good. So I represent the Feed the Future Toolkit that you all have seen. And so I think it's striking that, I think you're gonna hear very similar things from all of us, but from the vantage of Feed the Future and food systems, the gaze might just look a bit more at agricultural livelihoods, what's the impact on the food system. But at the end of the day, the actual resource conflicts at play are things like there could be a host community and newly displaced people and increased tensions around water points. There could be ethnic conflict over land in Easter DRC, where there's just really ambiguous understandings of land boundaries. And then another extremely common one is conflict between farmers and pastoralists over just what exactly are those corridors? Where are people going and how are climate and other factors shifting where folks do go? So I think these will resonate as we hear and the only real difference I would say from that Feed the Future lens is just a bit more of a gaze on food systems. What does that mean for agricultural livelihoods? Certain features there. But at the end of the day, the issue set is so, so similar. So with that, yeah, over to, or back to David. No, Daniel. Yeah, so I appreciate all the points Jesse made. And a lot of these, I think, came up in the initial conversation and in some of Carol's opening remarks and the great conversation between Tagin and Peter, excuse me. But we see land as sort of a central modality and conflict in many different contexts. Certainly pastoralist, herder conflict or pastoralist, pastoralist conflict is increasing incredible frequency. I'll cite some slightly dated data, just a few years old. But since 2010, there's been over 15,000 deaths linked to farmer-herder violence in Western Central Africa, more than half of those since 2018. So we're seeing a very concerning trend line as it relates to that particular issue. But there's any number of modalities that come up that tie back to land, whether that's human mobility, whether that's urbanization, high value natural resources, broad spectrum of environmental degradation. Violent extremism often land plays a critical role. As I see it, and as Carol knows incredibly well, land is often a critical modality of conflict. And in reality, much of what we are doing in development centers around land, land rights, land use, land access. And just another point that I'll add to that, that we do need to consider and Tegan alluded to this, is the implications of land use and land rights following conflict and the risks that the disruption of land systems, both formal and informal, that get disrupted by conflict, can then splinter into other forms of more localized conflict following sort of more centralized organized conflict. So considering all of these spectrums are all sort of highlighted in the toolkit and underscore the role that land does play in natural resources and conflict. So I'm representing the water side of things, which is obviously an extirpably way to land and to food, but one thing I wanna just mention from the get-go is there are actually plenty more examples of cooperation over water than there are a conflict over water. And for all the talk of water wars, which is a real threat, it's important to keep that in mind. That is an opportunity moving forward that shared water resources do create opportunities for repeated interactions that can be positive or neutral. And so with all that being said, water can be a trigger of new conflict, it can escalate existing conflict, it can be a casualty of conflict, it can jump into it a bit later. And it can also be used as a weapon, as you can see in the headlines of Ukraine right now with the dam that was bombed. And so this conflict can be everything from international with the GERD and Ethiopia as an example that was mentioned earlier, to hyper-local with farm-cured conflict over shared water resources. And a good example of all of this is if you think about in northern Jordan, where you've had a huge influx of refugees who have come from Syria, there are examples of that putting pressure on a dwindling water supply that was already quite stressed and you're seeing decreases in precipitation, you're seeing less and less water available, less and less frequently essentially reported. And that's led to some violence and some unrest related to the refugees that have come in and between the refugees and the close community. So it can be hyper-local, it can be international, it can be a weapon, it can be all these different things. There are so many different ways that water and conflict interact. And really the purpose of this toolkit is to look at not just how water can contribute to conflict, but also how conflict can impact water programming or progress on water. So I think I'll leave that as my little shout-out and go into some more specific. Wonderful. So specific questions for each of you. Daniel, you co-authored the Land and Conflict Toolkit. Who is the research targeted towards and how do you see them using it? Great question. I think probably Nicky and Jesse will agree is that these are manuals fundamentally, that these are remarkably difficult, topical questions and incredibly challenging programmatic questions. So in that regard, the fundamental, the truly, the audience was written for was USA Admissions, thinks about how USA does business, what the missions might need and how they can support the very difficult, grounded work that they are considering as environment, land rights, land use and conflict come together. So that's the number one audience. But again, I think that there is utility to any number of partners. So thrilled that DRC is here and thinking about IPs, the implementing partners that we're working with and thinking about the local government instructors that we are in communication with and thinking about all the different actors who effectively have to respond to this set of issues and have to set in, and again, a wide set of issues. As Nicky rightly pointed out, we're thinking about scales of international and regional conflict as well as scales of hyper-local inter-communal conflict. So really trying to understand what the approaches are, what the best practices are and what the leverageable opportunities are within those places. And ultimately, the people making those decisions are those that are much closer to the ground than those of us working here in Washington. Thank you. Nicky, the water and conflict toolkit focuses in part on how conflict can derail water, sanitation and health activities. Can you talk a bit about how this is playing out within USA programming and how it can be addressed? Yeah, absolutely. Apparently my mic was off, so now I have this one. So one thing I mentioned is that the toolkit goes into not just how water can contribute to or exacerbate conflicts, but also the other way around how conflicts can disrupt water programming. And there are a few different ways in which this plays out. The first is you can see destruction of infrastructure that's already been invested in, whether it's dams or water distribution systems, pipes. Or you see that physical damage that happens as a result of conflict. So we're coming across that a good bit. Another one is really just the erosion of governance systems that are in place. At USA, we really focus on governance and financing and trying to drive catalytic change by changing systems and not just fixing a problem here and there in one village or another, really trying to lift the whole system. And so if you are in the middle of a conflict, perhaps you have more trouble collecting taxes, which means you have less revenue to be able to maintain water supplies in urban areas or in peri-urban areas. That's just kind of a tangible example of what that looks like. And then there's also just the kind of how USA does business and logistics front. So displacement is a huge issue. More than 1% of the global population is currently displaced. So a lot of times we think of camps, how do you provide sustainable water and sanitation services in camps or in urban areas where many displaced people are settling? And how do you do that, given that most conflict is protracted and is going to last on average more than a dozen years? You have to be thinking way further ahead and you also have to embed flexibility into your system. So things like conflict modifiers in contracts that USA rewards. So really it's affecting all of the different things that USA does and really just the way that we operate. And we're hoping that this toolkit cannot just help missions think through those things ahead of time, but also implementing partners and kind of drive some innovation as we're releasing solicitations for activities. Excellent. And Jesse, each of these toolkits contains a conflict analysis section with detailed guidance on how to break down, unpack, understand conflict in the context that we're working in. Can you give us a sense for Feed the Future programming? What does conflict analysis look like? How does that work and can you take us through an example? Yeah, it's a great question and you all can let me know afterwards if the example lands. So first of all, the cornerstone is excellent conflict analysis, but I think I want us all to picture this natural resource management activity in Niger. And so the first foundational stage is that conflict analysis. For this activity in Niger, some of the dynamics that come up were around farmer-pestoralist dynamics that farmer-pestoralist conflict is on the rise in large part because pastoralists are going into new areas and they can be perceived as really aggressive when actually it's not as purposeful that way, but there's just folks going into different areas and there's a lack of information about what's going on. At the same time, in Niger and since the 1990s, there's been rules, national rules around land use that favors farmers that disadvantages pastoralists as well. So you have your conflict analysis, some of those key nuggets come out and then there's that question of, okay, how do those key conflict drivers? I've learned about, interact with this intervention, I'm thinking about this natural resource management intervention. And so we've learned things like, okay, there's a lack of collective action, there's a lack of transparency and a shared understanding of where we can go and how and people are being misperceived to be more violent or to have different intentions than they actually do. So then the question is, okay, what is the goal, what's the problem and what's the goal of my program? And we need to think about those things. We need to figure out how would we engage with that lack of trust, lack of collective action, lack of shared roles and a common understanding. And importantly, those national legislation that national level law that was working against pastoralists anyway, what can we do about that? So then the next piece is getting to that theory of change and sometimes you can put that in if then statement to just think about it. In this case, I'm just gonna share what this activity did. They found ways to map out pastoral corridors, doing that with farmers and pastoralists, bringing communities together to map out those corridors and come up with these bylaws and conventions for land use in that area, bringing everyone together around the table. They then used a really popular local radio station to broadcast what was going on with this for anyone who just wasn't able to be participating in those activities. And then importantly, they started working with the land offices and started doing advocacy around those national level rules that we're working against pastoralists, sort of addressing that more entrenched big picture power side to it. So that's one example of what it looks like to go through that and I think something important that David has actually taught me to think about more clearly is that NRM goals and conflict goals in this situation are the exact same thing. The conflict system, the food system, natural resource management system, they're one in the same, the only way, they're all with the same underpinning dynamics and there's no way to get at a good natural resource management in this context without really carefully thinking about that conflict system all the way out. So that's my example. Yeah, and thanks to David. All too true. So one more question for all of you before we get to some questions from the audience. In what way does the work described in each of these toolkits speak to the humanitarian development peace nexus? Now for those perhaps unfamiliar humanitarian development peace nexus, we're talking about coherence in the conversation among the collaboration or the cooperation among those various three pillars of USAID's work, really of international work in general. Increasing that coherence, shoring up some of the shortcomings that each one of those pillars has and trying to strengthen through that collaborative work the total picture of what we're doing. So I will start from the other end this time and ask Mickey if you can speak a little bit to that. Yeah, I mean, it's obvious that all three sort of types of USAID assistants here have different funding streams, have totally different ways of operating. And I think one of the first things that needs to happen is just an understanding of where each other is working literally geographically sometimes, but also just our different areas of focus. That coordination on the DC side but also in missions is really crucial. I think also, I mentioned the point about flexibility and building that into designs. I think on the development side, a lot of times we are not quite as quick to act. We're very slow actually. And just a good example of how humanitarian development piece coherence can play out in a positive way in a conflict setting. And this is kind of highlighted in the toolkit with a bunch of different examples. But in the Philippines during the Marawi siege a few years back, there was an existing activity that was focused on development wash that was operating at the time and they were able to flex and provide support to a humanitarian activity that was supporting IDPs that were displaced as a result of that conflict with things like assessments and just kind of providing some of the development aspects of that activity and giving more evidence to inform the new humanitarian activity that was responding to that crisis. And so I think that when you have that shared understanding of what each other is doing, and again this is in DC but also in the field, you are more able to adapt quickly and adaptively manage to these crises. Yeah, I think I'll leave it there for now. Cheers, Stena. Yeah, those are great points. And I would say time and time again, we have seen that the systems that we, that prevent conflict, in particular as my colleagues have mentioned, strong governance structures both formal and formal are oftentimes the same systems that enable resilience to climate shocks. So in that sense, fundamentally, conflict mitigation is a form of climate change resilience. It enables us to strengthen the systems that are key to managing these shocks and we've seen them time and time again where the communities that have enabled cooperation structures or peace committees are in fact able to withstand climate shocks. And so that speaks to all sides of the development equation and represents a central tool within the land and conflict toolkit. Jesse, any thoughts? I wanna bring it back to the tool kits and there's two key things I see the tool kits doing for the HDP nexus conversation. One is sort of an elephant in the room is that the P and HDP is under resourced and so the most impactful thing we can do to really have the HDP nexus being meaningful on the peace side is to be mainstreaming conflict sensitivity, integrating conflict throughout all development and humanitarian investments. It's the number one way these tool kits enable us to just move the needle, be seeking peace opportunities wherever we can in some of these larger scale investments that are out there. And then the second one that I care quite a bit about is that on the one hand, every single intervention around the world should be conflict sensitive but it's also the case that these tools are especially important in the midst of crisis and conflict. And there's a bit of a development allergy to leaning into areas of a current protracted crisis because maybe that's not what we do, maybe we're slow, that's for humanitarian folks. But when we have folks displaced on average for a dozen years, when we have the scale of protracted crisis and conflict, at some point it needs to be a development priority to lean into these places with development and long-term investments that actually pave the foundation for a more dignified life and having tools and a playbook for how to do that through things like this toolkit, I hope would get us over that allergy. It would make it seem possible and actually quite important to be leaning into these places with these kinds of approaches and to me that's another area where yeah, the toolkit's really advanced the plot with the HDP Nexus conversation. So those are terrific points and I have a question from our online audience that we'll add to that. If I can see some hands, if we have questions from the audience, maybe we can pre-position the microphone there while I ask this one. How do you ensure doing no harm? As we are a major international donor coming in to try and work with local conflicts in these fragile environments, these places we should be leaning into, how do we ensure we do no harm as we do that? And Daniel, I think I'll start with you this time. You know, I wanna put that back to you. Dave is a true expert in this space and I would love your two cents on that question. Yeah. I wasn't expecting to do that. All right, I'm gonna defer one more time. I will happily thank you, give an answer, but let me go back to Nicky again and I'll go after the other two speakers. We're just punting it around. I'll just send it to Jesse. You know, I think that conflict analysis is a really important tool in this, you know, thinking ahead, thinking about what the impacts of the activity on conflict dynamics are and also what the impacts of conflict dynamics are on the activity, kind of that reciprocal relationship again and conflict analysis can be a really crucial tool to thinking through that. And yeah, I'm honestly gonna punt it back to David because he's the expert on this, so. All righty. I gave you about 10 seconds to think about it. So I will then not punt this. So I think the panelists have already talked about two very critical issues that really feed into this. One is analysis, the other is localization. What we do, we as the global community of intervenors, development providers, humanitarians has to be based in proper analysis. That analysis cannot simply be a quantitative analysis of market systems and hectares and what kind of amount we are putting in of a certain thing. We are putting resources regardless what kind of sector we work in into fragile areas, period. That's every area that USAID works in. Our broadsheets say 80% of the countries that USAID works in are conflict and violence affected. Personally, I would put that at 100%. Once we factor in social and political mistrust, marginalization, exclusion, government backsliding, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, there's a long list of things that create the kind of context in which we cannot get away with thinking this is not fragile, this is not conflict affected. Even if there's not a shooting war going on, we're talking about conflict dynamics. And including that analysis as a fundamental part of whatever we do is an absolutely critical thing. The other part of that is localization. If we are going in to these areas and saying here is the programming you need and we are going to provide it to you, you're welcome, there's a fundamental problem there. That kind of programming, that kind of insertion, we know from long historical experience gets resistance, period, even if ostensibly speaking, this is the right thing to do. If we are not working through the local communities who will be affected by this, if we are not empowering them as part of the decision making process, if we are not deriving our picture of what's needed from them and then providing what we have been instructed to do, we will run into problems. Now, in any given area, there will be specifics of those dynamics that make for a very bespoke answer to how do you do no harm. But if we have begun with those two things, we are on the right track. If we have not, there is no bespoke answer that will be correct, that will give enough information for us to really move forward with and not do harm. So I will leave it with that. Sir, I saw your hand up, you've got the microphone. Hi, my name's Joseph Ashmore. I work for the International Organization for Migration. I'm going to ask a question which is actually much more personal than what my agency is interested in. But to me, a lot of, for example, water issues relate to the land on which the water source is. Thanks so much for having a panel with the three of you, for example, looking at different aspects. But when you come to the field, we have different conversations. We have the same poured field program manager trying to build a peace building program, but coming with three different toolkits, three different global conversations. So how do we, building on, you know, the three of you being on the same panel, how do we continue to build a global kind of, conversations at global level which align more on the different sectors of intervention and very strong expertise we have? That's a great question. I can take a first crack. And it's a good question. And I think that to some extent there's a bit of purposeful redundancy because the reality is, the closer you get to the ground, like when I did my field work, for example, and I was talking to people about climate change and conflict, I would ask a question about climate change and they would tell me all about conflict. When I asked a question about conflict, they'd tell me all about climate change. So the reality is that for those that are operating with communities affected by land, water, food security and conflict, it's not as nearly as clean as broader structures might expect it to be. So what I think each of these toolkits does is it hones in on specific issues that might be able to support the sorts of programs that are being thought about. And it's not that there isn't any overlap or even some redundancies, but that there are really useful places to start that might speak to a specific set of issues. I would add too, I think it's the case we have very similar examples within each of our toolkits. I don't know what the Venn diagram would be, but there's something there where there's just like a strong core that's quite similar. But I think some of the utility to having different toolkits, I'll just speak from the Feed the Future perspective, we really want practitioners who are quite busy and overloaded to pick it up and have it feel familiar. And so I think there can be added value to having it, especially with Feed the Future food systems, et cetera. There just might be some terminology or framing or examples that feel a little closer to home, even though actually it's secretly 10% of a land toolkit, 10% of a water toolkit in there. So, you know, because I think there was a question like why have three? I think there is an added value, but something we've even talked about is how to cross-reference them and just guide folks to where the synergies are and how there actually is quite a fair amount of overlap. That overlap, by the way, I will add that to my answer on the do no harm is recognizing that a siloed approach in which each of these areas of work is discreet and doesn't touch the others is fundamentally not a do no harm approach. We need to match our thinking to the lived experience and have the flexibility to pivot and change where we run into those places where our panelists are talking about the kind of environment that is not conducive to kind of a steady-state approach. Miss, I see you with the microphone. Yeah, just turned it off. My name is Desiree Dehaven. I'm from EcoDit. I had a question mainly geared towards post-conflict reconstruction. I know with a lot of conflict programming, environment, natural resources are not a priority. The argument is often made that that is something that should be considered after other more critical priorities are taken care of, but going back to Tegan's point about an opportunity to build these structures, build the systems that are geared towards managing resources more effectively, I was wondering if you all could comment on how to bring that more to a forefront for programs that are not really in name geared towards environment or natural resources. I might start, but I'm curious what the rest of my fellow panelists think. So I would say from the food space, building up livelihoods is the number one priority in post-conflict reconstruction, getting markets flowing again, I mean, getting different kinds of groups to engage in markets that interdependence, that's some of the number one stuff you'd be looking for, both for people's economic opportunities in rebuilding, but also to be finding ways for folks to be interacting across groups and hopefully fostering different kinds of social cohesion connections than they had before. And in the context of those agricultural livelihoods, and by agricultural I do mean pastoralist and farming, et cetera, we strive to do that in these climate smart ways where we're thinking about natural resource management, all of that. So I think that can almost be kind of like a train to catch to loop a lot of this really important work onto because re-establishing livelihoods is probably the number one thing we're thinking about in addition to infrastructure, governance, rule of law, et cetera. But yeah, over to others. Yeah, I'll just really quickly say, hey, that's a great question. I think that's a really important issue set post-conflict places for a host of different reasons that are vulnerable to large scale environmental destruction, particular extraction, and it's a real issue set. And I think that the second piece of that is land rights can get very complicated in the return of individuals following conflict. So just a quick example is that when we were doing some work out in Northern Uganda where there was conflict with the LRA, there was a program that was developed by the mission that supported justice systems outside of the formal court systems because the court systems would take so long that the ability to provide clear rights to individuals was a way to get in front of conflict. I think the issue set is much broader and acknowledge it and would note that in the land conflict toolkit there is a section specifically on post-conflict environmental issues. Yeah, I think one thing I wanna just sort of say, my colleagues like to say that the climate crisis is a water crisis, water tends to be the way that climate rears its head, whether it's too much water, too little water, or polluted water. And I think that with water specifically, water resources management is something that we're really trying to mainstream as much as water is really synonymous with so many different things. It's synonymous with health, it's synonymous with education, women's empowerment, all these different issues. And I think that even outside of conflict context, USAID is really trying to push for thinking about water more holistically as part of water resources management in addition to the traditional water sanitation and hygiene. And I think as that effort is happening, it will sort of just naturally apply to post-conflict context as well, if that makes sense. So it's kind of a broader umbrella that yeah, we can't really be ignoring. You can't have water, or you can't think about water without thinking about environmental issues. So yeah, I don't know that I gave you an actual answer, but just giving you some validation, yes, I agree. Oh, great points. I have another question from the online audience here. What kind of additional information? What else do we need? What kind of research would make these toolkits more robust? Looking forward from that, past the toolkits themselves, what do we need to know that we don't know enough about that present? I can start. Sure. I think ideally we would be funding, supporting, collaborating with local think tanks. And if not hyper local, then in the capital or even regional if needed, that are doing really rich local conflict analysis whenever possible. And otherwise finding ways, because I think this is what we're talking about these toolkits at a global level. People can ask me as a conflict advisor about a place, and I'm like, I have no idea. I focus on the countries I work in. I can give general principles, but the end of the day, there's so the political economy and the conflict dynamics and a given local geography as well as the conflict dynamics that scale up that spillover from transnational broader dynamics, et cetera. It's just so essential. And I think investing in really strong conflict analysis, not always us doing an Alucard brand new analysis, but leveraging excellent work by others is to me a priority. Yeah, I think that building on David's points about localization, we with these conflicts, with these toolkits tried to be as generalizable as possible, but at the end of the day, each conflict is unique. It's hyperlocal dynamics that we're never gonna be able to fully understand or capture in one document and particularly not one document that's under thousands of pages. So I think leveraging local universities and think tanks like Jesse was saying is really the key there, just to be able to actually take the sort of general principles that we mentioned in the toolkits and actually apply them to hyperlocal context. I agree wholeheartedly with my colleagues. I think there's only so much you can know from a distance. I think other more discreet issues that I would love to know more about that I think will take some time to develop is subnational and hyperlocal climate risks. I think heat as a discreet issue, as a climate shock, as compared to heat affecting other systems is going to become depressingly clear as the impacts of climate change become more acute. And I think anything that we can get really at that as grounded as possible is going to advance the field. Of course. One small addition to I'm a huge fan of conflict sensitivity resource facilities and hub models. So the punchline is that actually this work is not super easy. It is hard and having support, embedded support that can do coaching, a la carte conflict analysis, providing exactly what folks need when they need it, whether for a donor community in a particular region for a mission, et cetera. All of that is invaluable as someone with a toddler, like the mantra that like actually you need support and that's okay. This is kind of to me also an analogy for the hub model. And I think it's just such an important approach when possible. That's a great question. That's a great point. I think we have time for one more question. If we don't have one in the audience, I have one online, but I'd like to alternate back and forth and come back here if we could. Does anybody here have a question? In that case, let's look upwards towards the policy realm. We now have global policy from the US government speaking to, sorry, what's? Sorry that you put up that. We now have global policy. That was unintentional, but from the US government speaking to, for example, the strategy to prevent conflict and promote stability that drives the US government to think of things like this nexus of climate, climate security conflict in all of our programming. How do we try best to ensure that what we're talking about in this room today gets pushed upwards towards policy like that? I mean, I can try to start. I think one step that we've taken in the water space, we have the whole of government global water strategy that isn't just a USAID documented encompasses inputs and plans from 15 different government agencies. And for the first time, when we were rewriting this global water strategy last year, we now have a strategic objective that is specifically focused on linkages between water conflict and fragility. And that includes, you know, efforts to try and reduce conflict and increase cooperation over shared waters, you know, to improve humanitarian development coherence. So I think elevating this as an issue within our sort of discrete sectors and elevating it to the level of our highest policy document, which for us is the global water strategy and is other, you know, global food security strategy, for example, for the future initiative. I think that's one way that we're really able to mainstream this as an issue beyond just, you know, the kind of peace building community. I'll look up as well, huh? But I think it's an important question and one I would highlight this particular space as an example of how we might be doing that and also the work that Tegan and her team has been doing in bringing together different branches of the U.S. international policy establishment together to start thinking about these issues collectively. So, you know, I think aid people tend to be rightfully thinking about what our missions are doing and what they can do to support the communities that are in. I think that is fundamentally our role. In a non-transactional way. And being able to bring the lessons and insights that our mission colleagues in particular gather from those places to these broader conversations is, I think, an important role that the agency can play. I would say, so, David, as you know, because you played a key role in this, the global food security strategy that guides the future initiative, that has a new cross-cutting goal, basically, on conflict. I think where we fall short, and, you know, this is less than a year out on the street, so maybe it's just kind of what's appropriate timeline-wise, but it's the implementation plan behind the policy and then where I go to is about kind of more consensus in our broader community of practice, like across donors and partners and maybe with the U.N. system. Like, how do we, so, at USAID at least, but we are getting conflict enshrined in a number of our policies, that's great, but I think it's the implementation plan after that, as well as some of these broader global governance areas, just kind of all, yeah, singing from the same sheet of music. I was botched idioms, but I think I did it right. Same drumbeat, something like that. So, anyway, that's where I think more work needs to be done. Excellent, and with that, we are at time. If I can get a hand for all of our panelists. Thank you so much for all of that, and thank you, all of you, for being an active audience.