DUBAI: “Safeguarding Nature, Securing People” was the title of a panel gathering at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday which discussed the connected issues of environmental degradation and security.

The discussion also highlighted the impact of land degradation, droughts, and extreme weather events on human and national security.

Ibrahim Thiaw, undersecretary-general of the UN and executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, moderated the session and opened by saying that in many countries, security concerns were focused on “national security, armed forces and intelligence services, but we know that the environment is also affecting us deeply.”

Ilwad Elman, chief operating officer of the Elman Peace Centre, said that only recently had we “begun to draw the strong correlation and the intersection of the two crises of human security and (that) caused by environmental stressors and environmental aggregation” and added: “In Somalia, “we find ourselves right at the nexus of that.”

She added that food and water insecurity posed not only environmental challenges but also had a “direct linkage to the desperation that yields young people particularly to be motivated to join armed groups” — not because they agreed with the ideology, but “to be able to survive.”

Elman explained the Elman Peace Centre works on “sustainable peace building” and “the rehabilitation and reintegration of young people.”

It focuses on climate resilience even though that is not its main mandate because “the environments we’re sending people back to are changing so rapidly our peace building interventions were not sustainable,” she said.

Such crises are not only limited to developing countries. Ukraine, which supplies food to 400 million people globally, was unable to do so due to the war, according to the country’s Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food Vitalii Koval.

Some 60 percent of Ukraine’s income comes from agrarian food exports, which has been drastically impacted. This, combined with the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam, has had disastrous consequences for the country, he said.

Koval added: “It is very important that the world community should elaborate new mechanisms to respond, and these mechanisms need to be immediate — not tomorrow, not sometime in the future, (but) today.”

Conflicts undoubtedly exacerbate environmental stressors, but the opposite is also true.

Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Adel bin Ahmed Al-Jubeir said: “Land degradation leads to conflicts, leads to violence, leads to extremism, leads to terrorism, leads to migration, leads to political instability, and leads to all of us paying an extremely high price to deal with the consequences of an issue that, had we paid attention to at the outset, would have cost us a fraction of the resources.”

The link between environmental degradation and security was “very clear, but we have not been paying sufficient attention to it,” he added.

Both Al-Jubeir and Elman said environmental and land degradation were not issues limited to desert or developing countries.

They pointed out the wildfires in California and the impact of such issues on declining water levels on Germany’s Rhine river and the Panama Canal. Drought has meant lower water levels, which means fewer ships can pass through, resulting in delays and increased shipping costs.

Elman also highlighted how the “discourse of climate change has only recently shifted from a very Global North perspective, overlooking the lived realities, the indigenous best practices and solutions from communities on the ground. Resources are distributed in a way that is, I would say, still very imperialistic.”

For example, Elman addressed a meeting of the UN Security Council on the effects of climate change on international peace and security in 2021. The resolution, put forth by Ireland and Niger, was vetoed despite 111 member states being in favor of it.

And so, she said, there was a need for “spaces that are able to move the agenda forward and recognize it as a security threat of global impact, and if the Security Council is not the place for that, other avenues need to be explored.”

Al-Jubeir responded: “If it’s not efficient enough, you do it unilaterally.”

Multilateralism was great for talks, he added, but “if those talks do not lead to concrete results, there should be nothing in the way of preventing countries who have the means to engage with other countries directly and put in place mechanisms that actually work.”

As an example, he said Saudi Arabia launched the Middle East Green Initiative that brought together over 22 countries in the region to help them adopt a circular carbon economy, along with other funding and knowledge-sharing programs that ensured a comprehensive approach.