Tacloban, in the Philippines, one of the areas hit hardest by super typhoon Haiyan in November 2013. The disaster coincided with the COP19 climate talks and served as the backdrop for negotiations on mechanisms of damage and losses. Credit: Russell Watkins/Department for International Development

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, May 20 2016 (IPS)

As the Global South works to overcome a history of weak institutions, armed conflict and poverty-driven forced exodus, key causes of its humanitarian crises, developing countries now have to also fight to keep global warming from compounding their problems.

“Disaster Risk Reduction and climate change adaption in fragile and conflict-affected states in the Global South have long been overlooked, as it is often perceived as too challenging or a lower priority,” Janani Vivekananda, an expert in security and climate change, told IPS.

Vivekananda, the head of Environment, Climate Change and Security in International Alert, a London-based non-governmental organisation working to prevent and end violent conflict around the globe, cited her country, Sri Lanka, as an example of problems shared by developing countries.

“Given the fragile political situation since 25 years of violent conflict ended in May 2009, ensuring that climate impacts do not fuel latent conflict dynamics is critical,” she said from London.

A politically unstable developing island nation like Sri Lanka, and many other countries in the South, will see their problems multiply in a warmer planet with higher sea levels, she said.

“Climate change is the ultimate ‘threat multiplier’: it will aggravate already fragile situations and may contribute to social upheaval and even violent conflict,” says “A New Climate for Peace”, an independent report commissioned in 2015 by members of the Group of Seven (G7) wealthiest nations.

This is the challenge faced by the governments and organisations that will attend the first World Humanitarian Summit to be held May 23-24 in Istanbul. The conference was convened by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, “to generate strong global support for bold changes in humanitarian action.”

At the summit, the delegates will search for ways to integrate the traditional conception of humanitarian emergencies with new crises, such as those caused by climate change, which this year caused record high temperatures.

“This is why the World Humanitarian Summit’s initiative to remake the humanitarian system is so timely and so important,” said Vivekananda.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that in the absence of policies that effectively curb greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures will rise by four degrees Celsius by 2100.

And even if the world were to reach the “safe limit” for global warming – a rise of 1.5 to 2.0 degrees C, the target agreed in the Paris Agreement in December – the effects would still be felt around the planet, warns the IPCC, which decided in April to prepare a special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The landmark climate deal is one of the key elements that the national delegations will have when they reach Istanbul, along with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, agreed in September, and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, agreed in March 2015.

More people were displaced worldwide in 2015 by weather-related hazards than by geophysical events. Credit: IDMC 2016 report

“Explicit recognition of the linkages between different types of risks and vulnerabilities is still missing,” said Vivekanada, with regard to the not yet formalised connection between these two agreements and the World Humanitarian Summit.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) forming part of the 2030 Agenda are essential for understanding the relationship between climate change and humanitarian assistance.

The report commissioned by the G7 says the poorest countries with the most fragile political systems, like Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo or Haiti face the greatest risks and difficulties adapting to climate change.

Climate pressure could hurt food production or require extra aid for local governments overwhelmed by the situation. In extreme circumstances, these phenomena can lead to forced migration.

According to the 2016 Global Report on Internal Displacement, published this month by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), more people were displaced in 2015 by hydrometeorological disasters (14.7 million) than by conflicts or violence (8.5 million).

The report also stressed the impact of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENOS) meteorological phenomenon and said that for the people most exposed and vulnerable to extreme rainfall and temperatures, the effects have been devastating and have caused displacement.

For example, El Niño caused intense drought along Central America’s Pacific coast and in particular in the so-called Dry Corridor, a long, arid stretch of dry forest where subsistence farming is predominant and rainfall shrank by 40 to 60 percent in the 2014 rainy season.

“Hundreds of people were forced to leave Nicaragua because of the drought,” Juan Carlos Méndez, with Costa Rica’s National Commission for Risk Prevention and Emergency Management (CNE), told IPS.

As a CNE official, Méndez is also an adviser to the Nansen Initiative, an inter-governmental process to address the challenges of cross-border displacement in the context of disasters and the effects of climate change.

“This is where we see the biggest political and technical challenges. You can clearly associate displacement with a natural disaster like an earthquake or a hurricane, but now we have to link it to climate change issues,” the expert said.

Partly for that reason, Costa Rica and another 17 countries launched the Geneva Pledge for Human Rights in Climate Action in February 2015, a voluntary initiative to get human rights issues included in the climate talks.

In the final version of the Paris Agreement, the concept was incorporated as one of the principles that will guide its implementation.

The simultaneous inclusion of climate change and its humanitarian impacts in international summits is not new, but is growing.

The backdrop to the climate talks at the 19th United Nations Climate Change Conference in November 2013 in Warsaw was the devastation wrought by Super Typhoon Haiyan in Southeast Asia, and in the Philippines in particular.

The human impact of the typhoon, which claimed 6,300 lives, intensified the talks in the Polish capital and prompted the creation of a mechanism to address climate change-related damage and losses.

A scientific study published in January this year found that the Philippines would experience the highest sea level rise in the world, up to 14.7 mm a year – nearly five times the global average.

“Which is why it is very urgent for the Philippines to beef up efforts on disaster preparedness, particularly in the communities with high risk for disasters and high poverty incidence,” Ivy Marian Panganiban, an activist with the Caucus of Development NGO Networks (CODE-NGO), told IPS.

Along with six other Filipino institutions, CODE-NGO is calling for locally-based humanitarian emergency response, with an emphasis on local leadership, and hopes Istanbul will provide guidelines in that sense.

NGOS “should really be capacitated and involved in the governance process since they are the ones that are in the forefront – people who are actually affected by disasters,” she said from Manila.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Excerpt:

M23 rebels near Sake, Eastern DR Congo. Credit: William Lloyd-George/IPS

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 13 2013 (IPS)

Despite existing local expertise and strategies in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to build peace-supporting structures at the community level, official debates and media coverage continue to focus predominantly on military interventions.

“Local actors work in isolation and their actions are not part of a global peacebuilding process in the DRC. Their recommendations and their work on the ground are not taken into account,” Eric Malolo from Reseau Haki na Amani (RHA), a network of civil society organisations, told IPS.“Violence becomes a means of expression when there is no framework of reference." -- Suliman Baldo of ICTJ

As the coordinator of RHA, Malolo works in Orientale, a province in the northeast. RHA was founded in 2004 as a direct response to ethnic tensions between the Hema and Lendu communities in DRC’s Ituri region.

Its objective is to help reconcile these two tribes and to address frequent conflicts over land, with dialogue-supporting initiatives at the community-level.

“Barzas” – large community meetings organised by RHA – proved to be a very useful tool, enabling local populations to develop a deeper understanding of local conflict dimensions and how these are perceived by the different groups living in the same community.

“Most problems identified during these gatherings do not necessarily find a solution, but the main thing is letting the communities speak out and enter a process of intercommunity and pacific coexistence,” Malolo said.

Not only are locals working and living in the affected communities not sufficiently involved in ongoing peacebuilding efforts in the central African country, they often also lack political support.

In the context of property and identity-related conflicts, Malolo said, politicians are generally elected because they campaigned on a platform of protecting their own ethnic community’s interests.

“A latent intercommunity conflict is the reason for the presence of such extremist politicians,” he said. “To not risk these votes, they hinder decisively ongoing reconciliation process between communities.

“Even administrative staff receives instructions from politicians to stop the conflict resolution process started by some local actors. Or in other words, efforts started by local actors are often blocked by politicians who don’t agree with this kind of change,” he added.

Most experts agree that to be effective, peacebuilding requires intertwined processes and structures that run from the grassroots to the national level – especially in deeply fragmented and traumatised societies like the DRC.

But a look at official policymaking appears to prove Malolo’s point. The new Peace, Security and Cooperation Framework (PSCF) agreement for DRC, an accord signed by 11 African heads of state in Addis Ababa in February, has “no mention of local civil society and it was not prepared with any involvement of those local actors,” Maria Lange, DRC country manager at International Alert, a London-based charity, told IPS.

“The domestic oversight committee established by the DRC government for the implementation of the domestic commitments under the PSCF does not include any civil society representatives – these are limited to a parallel monitoring committee which has no decision-making authority,” she said.

A military emphasis

Even though the peace agreement represents an important milestone, Aloys Tegera from the Pole Institute regards the military approach backed up by the international community with scepticism.

The U.N. Security Council’s creation in March of its 3,000-strong “first-ever ‘offensive’ combat force“, alongside the 20,500 peacekeepers already in the country, was hailed by the political elite and raised expectations among Congolese “which cannot be met”, Tegera told IPS.

People are bound to learn that realistically, a political solution is the only way forward, said the research director at the Goma-based think tank.

“When I read the current military discourse of many Congolese, however, I am afraid to say that 20 years of suffering and wars have not taught us much,” he said.

For Tegera, the conflict is rooted in a “deadly triangle” of “identity, land and power”.

Where to find the most critical conflict-drivers – inside or outside the country – to what extent they matter and how to tackle them are still controversial questions. What is clear is that a myriad of local, regional and international actors pursue their own interests, and fall back on violence as an instrument to enforce them.

This is often carried out by local armed actors such as militias and rebel groups, who are characterised more often than not by a lack of political ideology, said Suliman Baldo of the New York-based International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ).

“They are fictitious creations of whoever is intervening and mainly of these very greedy neighbours,” the director of ICTJ’s Africa Programme told IPS.

At the community and provincial levels, in an atmosphere of localised violence, these groups have gained the upper hand, overruling traditional leaders who would be more disposed to resolving conflicts “traditionally”, that is to say, through dialogue and accommodation with other groups.

“Violence becomes a means of expression when there is no framework of reference. There is no state to settle disputes among the population, there is no traditional authority to moderate tendencies towards violence and to find solutions and resolutions for problems within or among different groups,” Baldo explained.

Concluding that there is a power vacuum at the local level, however, is a false assumption. Where central authority collapses, other actors step in, creating alternative governance structures.

The evolving role of civil society

Over the years, many of the gaps left by dysfunctional or nonexistent state institutions have been filled by Congolese civil society groups, which provide essential social services such as healthcare and schooling. However, they have also been co-opted into transitional institutions – for example, holding a certain number of seats in provincial and national assemblies.

“It is precisely because civil society has been forced into this state-substitution role that many have lost their awareness and practice of its fundamental role of holding the government to account,” Lange said.

While there are hardworking civil society groups pushing to achieve lasting and sustainable peace, others show core weaknesses that prevent them from fulfilling their proper functions, she added.

Many are “politicised and riven by power struggles”, organised along ethnic lines, and “follow donor priorities instead of the priorities of the people and communities they are meant to serve,” she said, citing the study “Ending the Deadlock – Towards a new vision of peace in eastern DRC” by International Alert, which included the results of extensive consultations with local NGOs, representatives of local ethnic communities, and church and academic leaders .

The study recommends a dialogue that begins at the grassroots, is revised at the provincial level, and finalised at the national level.

A bottom-up dialogue in itself would not be enough, said Tegera, stressing the importance of making strides in three key development sectors: education, roads and energy.

“With these three in place, within 20 years, there is a chance to see an emerging middle class, able to ask for accountability and proper governance. This is the only way forward for DRC everyone should press for,” he said.