Video Interview with Janani Vivekananda: Climate Change, Governance and Stability in Fragile States

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Many fragile states face exposure to numerous climate or environmental risks such as sea level rise, drought, extreme or more intense natural disasters. In terms of their vulnerability however, vulnerability is a combination of not just exposure but also sensitivity and adaptive capacity. The first two, exposure and sensitivity are in the hands of luck. That's in the weather systems and dependent on the topography of the country. However, adaptive capacity, that depends significantly on governance and stability. Now in a fragile state, governance and stability are going to be seriously affected by conflict. So we have this inexorable link between climate change and security. And so if we're trying to understand how to address the issue, we need to understand these linkages. So what we've been doing at International Alert for the past eight years is trying to really drill down and establish an empirical evidence base to understand what nuances, what the specifics of these links between climate change and security look like. And we have, I guess, five key areas or narratives around ways to address these link challenges of climate change and security. The first is around getting the institutions right. A lot of the risks faced by fragile states aren't purely around responding to climate risks. And the natural hazard in and of itself, it's around ensuring that there are appropriate institutions that can deal with the uncertainty and the flux, the unpredictable nature of changing weather, not simply the direct impacts, but also the indirect impacts on communities, physical safety, on food security, on clean water and various other basic services. The second narrative is around bringing in the private sector and understanding the link between resilience and trade. This is often overlooked in climate change adaptation, the traditional responses to climate change adaptation. But our work shows that the private sector plays a significant role. It can be positive and it can be negative. However, we need to understand what that role is and how to ensure that we minimise the negative impacts and maximise the positive role that the private sector can play. The third issue is around facing the challenges of migration. Now, there's a lot of talk around the role that migration plays linked to environmental change and climate change. But of course, there are complex drivers of migration. And there are significant security implications of this. But we need to understand in a more nuanced way what these challenges look like. It's not simply going to be international migration from sinking small islands to the developed world. A lot of it is rural urban migration. It's going to be changes in seasonal migration patterns amongst agricultural workers. We need to understand these trends and the peace and security implications of these trends. So that they can be changed so that they can be managed peacefully. The fourth issue links to resilience, to understanding that we need to focus on resilience. And this means embracing complexity, understanding the various linked dimensions of resilience. It's not simply about climate impacts. It's not simply about disasters and risk reduction. It's about understanding all the various facets of the challenge of resilience. don't face single risks in isolation they face climate risks such as increased rainfall in conjunction with increased livelihoods insecurity lack of opportunities challenges in education to get more skills and training to get additional options to to build their resilience so we need to be able to deal with complexity better within our institutions and within project interventions in fragile states and the fifth point is the need to rethink development now development plays a significant role in addressing the challenges of both conflict and climate change be it through climate change adaptation or disaster risk reduction or through peace building interventions however the current approach to development is is seriously limited in that it's very siloed at the headquarters level the way institutions are designed and and how projects are funded and implemented on the ground these silos remain from the top all the way down to the grassroots and this is a real obstacle to to really addressing resilience at the community and household level we need to rethink how development happens how it's funded and how structures responsible for development are structured such that we can cross these sectoral boundaries and and promote complex solutions to complex problems