What is it about?
Over the years, the United Nations peacekeeping missions have increasingly caused environmental impacts on the territories where they intervene. This article studies how these operations have been growingly aware of these consequences and how they are trying to address them. It identifies their environmental practices while questioning their limits. It finally discusses the political implications of linking UN peacekeeping to the environment.
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Photo by Dmitry Dreyer on Unsplash
Why is it important?
While being empirically and analytically challenging by shedding light on an overlooked aspect of UN, this article is politically relevant. Environmental mismanagement in peacekeeping can have dramatic outcomes such as the cholera outbreak in Haiti attests. Like any kind of practices which notoriously affect local beneficiaries, environmental conduct in peacekeeping missions deserves our attention. Better environmental management practices could undeniably improve missions’ outcomes, especially in a sustainable peace and a ‘do no harm’ perspective.
Perspectives
This article provides a reflexive understanding of what has been happening at the UN headquarters in the past fifteen years on how to better address the environmental impacts of their peace operations. It gives a detailed account of the challenges met to implement stronger policies between uneven missions and member states' obstruction. It also reflects upon the consequences of thinking about the environment as a peacekeeping issue: from the ecological footprint of the missions to the designation of an environmental threat to international security.
Lucile Maertens
Universite de Lausanne
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: From Blue to Green? Environmentalization and Securitization in UN Peacekeeping Practices, International Peacekeeping, February 2019, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/13533312.2019.1579648.
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Resources
Greening Peacekeeping: The Environmental Impact of UN Peace Operations
The 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti, triggered by the UN mission there, killed more than 9,000 people and affected nearly 807,000. This disastrous case drew attention to the negative effect UN peace operations can have on the surrounding communities and environment—something peacekeepers had started paying attention to with the deployment of new large-scale operations in the 2000s. As operations have grown in size, so too has the size of their environmental footprint. This report looks at the environmental impact of peace operations and how the UN has responded, including through policies and guidelines, dedicated staff, and training material. In particular, it assesses the challenges the Department of Field Support faces in implementing its Environment Strategy. Based on this assessment, which includes a detailed examination of the UN mission in Mali, the report puts forward a series of short-, medium-, and long-term recommendations. It concludes that a UN presence should not be a source of stress but should improve local environmental sustainability and build resilience.
The Environmental Impact of UN Peace Operations
On April 18th, IPI together with the Permanent Missions of Finland, Bangladesh and Italy, cohosted a policy forum event to launch the publication of the IPI policy paper on the environmental impact of UN peace operations.
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