Abstract
This is an interview with Christophe Hodder, the United Nations Climate Security and Environmental Advisor to Somalia, United Nations Environment Programme. In the interview, Hodder explains why it is so important for conventional security practitioners to build environmental considerations into peacebuilding. He explains how natural resource conflicts between groups are key sites of contestation in Somalia, more salient as the country experiences climate change. He talks about how militant groups use resource and resource conflicts to their advantage. Resolving natural resource conflicts is also important entry points for action, for addressing sources of conflict and building a foundation for peace. In the current moment, even as Somalia is beset by a difficult drought, it is important to work on long-run peacebuilding efforts through environmental restoration. Hodder provides examples of river bank protection programs and water catchment as areas ripe for cooperation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Background: Since the early 1990s, Somalia has experienced profound political instability since the Siad Barre regime was overthrown by militias in 1991. The country has experienced profound governance problems ever since, with the near absence of a functioning centralized government. Since the mid-2000s, the country has also faced an Islamist insurgency group Al Shabaab that has controlled parts of the country. The Horn of Africa in particular and Somalia in particular periodically also have faced severe drought risks, likely accentuated by the El Niño weather phenomenon and climate change. On two occasions, in 1992 and 2010–2011, Somalia experienced famines that led to the large-scale loss of life (Busby, 2022; Maxwell and Majid, 2016; Menkhaus, 2014).
Somalia’s ongoing violence and climate exposure have led to resolutions from the UN Security Council noting that climate change contributes to the country’s ongoing instability (United Nations Security Council, 2022). In 2020, the UN Assistance Mission in Somalia (UNSOM) became the first special political mission to have a climate security advisor tasked to mainstream climate and environment in the mission’s work, coordinate climate action with the UN, government actors, and NGOs, and supporting the government. Christophe Hodder has served as the climate security advisor for UNSOM since 2020. Climate security advisors are being created in other UN missions (Fireside chat with Christophe Hodder: Stemming climate change and insecurity, 2022; Hodder, 2021; Russo, 2022).
Hodder’s role reflects a resurgent interest in environmental peacebuilding, whether efforts to address environmental problems like climate change can diminish political violence in countries like Somalia. The emergent practice of environmental peacebuilding accompanies a renewed scholarly emphasis on the topic, as the field has matured from studying the causal connections between environmental change and violence/instability to start identifying solutions to the security problems associated with environmental and climate change.
Thank you for having me, my name is Christophe Hodder. I am the first climate security and environmental advisor to a special political mission or peacekeeping mission globally. My role is really to look at the interlinkages between climate change and insecurity, and what to do about it. I’m a sort of forerunner, a bit of a guinea pig. Today, three missions have climate security advisors globally, and I’ve been in the position about 2 years. I’ve been working a lot with both the UN mission in Somalia itself, but also the government, and also civil society organizations (CSOs) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working across Somalia.
I have been working for the last 20-odd years across different fragile states, working in Congo and Chad with MSF [Médicins San Frontiéres] and then working with various different NGOs and INGOs in West Africa and Central Africa. Before this job, I was actually in Nepal, working on the earthquake response. After the earthquake response, I spent quite a bit of time working with the government in Nepal, setting up the disaster management authority.
Actually, the work that I was doing in the field really made me understand this linkage between natural disasters and climatic-driven events such as landslides, such as displacement of people and competition over resources. Those sort of approaches actually led me into understanding more and more. In Nepal, what we did was really try to integrate a lot of this climate, insecurity, and instability and how that worked in disaster response, but also how do you link disaster and humanitarian and development with security. So that’s why I really got interested in climate and security. I then moved to Kenya for my wife’s job, and then was working on this conflict resolution program in some of the areas in Kenya and then got this opportunity to work with the UN in Somalia, so it was really exciting.
So I think, as usual, the answer is very complicated, and has multi-levels. It’s hard to have a very sequential policy theory of change, because things happen, and conflict and climate are so interlinked and underlie each other. It is very hard to unpack it all. It’s been 30 years of conflict. There are multi-facets to the conflict in terms of clan dynamics between the different groups and there are regional dynamics at play. There are movements of populations which then exacerbate conflict both internally and regionally, and there are fragilities in terms of both systems of governance, but also local systems of leadership. And, on top of that, then you also have the armed actors and the different militant groups. Those armed actors and the militant groups contribute to the instability, and so you have this mix of a really fragile state. All of this put together means that it’s quite a complicated situation.
But what we’re seeing is that the environmental angle is really one of those underlying parts. The theory is that climate change and environmental degradation do not directly lead to a conflict, but what it does is it exacerbates or enhances some of those conflict dynamics. So what we can see is that the dynamics definitely change as the drought situation happens, or flood or climatic events. On top of all that we also have quite an unprecedented or quite a large population rise, and a very young population as well.
In answer to your question, what we’re trying to do is to raise the importance of looking at environmental aspects, because you do need a stable environmental base to build on. Unless you have that, there will always be competition over the sharing of resources. If we can look at environmental stability at the same time as looking at political and economic stability, then hopefully that will lead to a longer lasting peace that everybody is trying to drive toward.
We can’t only focus on political and economic and social stability, but there is an imperative to focus on environmental stability, one that climate change is making more visible especially in fragile states. That angle of looking at environmental stability is also a lens driving some of the negotiations and peace processes. What we’re seeing now is that there’s a bit of a bell curve almost between competition over resources such as water and grazing lands. As the conflict gets more tense and complicated, there’s a point where conflict dynamic levels reduce, and then actually it can be used as a period or a window of collaboration. Communities can actually come together and start using climate change or using the fact that there isn’t water to try to find solutions. However, this is a short window and must be used productively and linked to climate adaptation and development funding to sustain the collaboration. Without it, the competition will increase and impact dynamics further.
To give you a concrete example, what we’re trying to do is with the military offensive happening at the moment, and as part of that, what we’re trying to do is to build awareness of environmental degradation as well as environmental peacebuilding approaches. How do you work with military and police and local forces to get more awareness of the impact of climate change and of climate-related events but also around environmental degradation? One way is to build on the awareness to find solutions together, such as refocusing military strategy on water points and water management.
For example, different militant groups will hide in the forest. The government forces or the communities often then would chop down the trees around the village. While that would stop the militant groups from hiding in that forest, then part of the problem after that is that contributes to energy lack of security, because then, there’s no charcoal left for use. It then contributes to soil erosion, which then causes a lack of ability to provide agricultural services. So there’s a link there. We really need to understand how the cycle of climate shock and human degradation really works.
Part of this is awareness raising, and it’s not just around the forest. There are other examples of a police force or military protecting and first of all securing some of the physical infrastructures like roads, offices, and the police stations. But actually what we’re noticing is the militant groups will take over things like the water wells as one of their first operations. Therefore, actually securing the water sources and the river banks, which then can be used for irrigation canals, should be some of the high priorities in terms of what we’re doing in terms of the military offensive.
A lot of it is around awareness raising at first, then the next steps are really around how do you work on building adaptation, and I think there’s a lot of discussion happened around that at COP 27, how do you build in climate adaptation in fragile states specifically in areas that really need it the most.
Unless there is proper adaptation and support, unless long-term thinking about environmental stability is happening for communities, unless that is brought on very soon after insecurity in unstable areas, that opens a gap and competition over resources and that’s where militant groups can easily come in. It’s really key that we look at adaptation of the financing and support to newly liberated areas or areas that are susceptible to where militant groups could take over.
There’s the security and the military part. Raising awareness is quite a key part of that. But then, after that, there’s obviously more of the stabilization angle. And this is how do we build in this adaptation at the early stages. Too often stabilization or security teams will do a quick fix. There will be a political level agreement, often without enough in terms of real inclusion of all levels of society, and that’s another sort of side process to this. But really understanding how you build in environmental peacebuilding and environmental approaches to stabilization is another story.
Now, the other part of this is environmental mediation, and we are trying to do that in several places. Understanding how do you bring two clans together to actually start talking about resource sharing and natural resource management.
We’re realizing that almost all conflicts actually do have some aspects of natural resource competition. If we can really build that out in terms of understanding of the environment side, looking at long-term sustainable approaches from the environmental perspective to peacebuilding, that’s really the key. So, for example, this is where security actors really need to start thinking about how to build in environment sustainability to the actual implementation of solutions in peacebuilding approaches.
So, for example, a security organization will just dig a well. But we’ve got to think about how do you make that much more sustainable? How do you look at the catchment area? How do you look at the underground water reservoirs to make sure there is enough? How do you look at the resource sharing around that well? How do you look at the longer-term aspects of the grazing lands linked to the water? How do you look at the ecosystem?
Really, it’s about building awareness. But it’s also more technical around nature-based solutions, opportunities at that local level to build a longer lasting environmental approach to peacebuilding.
To be honest, it’s incredibly hard. Everybody is thinking we have to save lives now. We have to really make a difference now. We do have to try to save as many lives as possible. That’s undeniable. What I’m saying and what we can do is try to do things at the same time. It’s not that we could only just save lives by intervening right now.
What I’m trying to argue is that you could actually do things at the same time. An example of this is the work we are doing around river bank stabilization. One of the issues we’ve been doing last year where we mapped out all the breakage points on the river and so as part of that mapping the breakage points, we located sandbags on those areas. There are several breakage points that then cause flooding, which causes this disruption to agriculture, to humans, to the cities. There are about one hundred identified breakage points where we knew that the river would break its bank. We pre-positioned sandbads before the flooding last year.
At the same time, we did a river bank stabilization program. We did compressed earth, and then we also planted trees along it to try to use the roots to stabilize the banks more effectively. We also did some work around vegetative gabion walls, not the traditional stone and metal iron cages that are often put down. We try to use fast-growing roots that would then bind the rocks together, which made it much more of a nature-based solution in terms of a proper gabion wall.
The short term was the humanitarian response, and we also did training and work with disaster management at the local level. But we also did then work in the medium term, where we did this bank stabilization. We also did a modeling out of the nature-based solution. We modeled out if we were to manage the flood plain by planting the right type of trees and the roots. Then when the river came in, we could then use storage along the drought sites. So in those areas we actually have put some storage where we managed to capture some of the water for agricultural purposes.
What I’m trying to say is that you can do short, medium, long term at the same time in the same place. What we need to do is to change this mindset that we can only do short-term quick responses. We need to do it together, and so I’m not at any point saying we cannot do humanitarian aid. What I’m saying is, you can do humanitarian aid at the same time as doing longer-term development programs and doing it together more collaboratively. This is where I think that we need to change the funding mechanism. We need to change policies. We need to change mental approaches.
Humanitarians need to think we’ll focus on our thinking, but we need to be in the same place, same time as the others. Development agencies need to try to do the work in the same area. The same with security actors, stabilization programs, peacekeeping operations—we focus so much on the short-term things and not linking this to the longer term. If we are doing it together collaboratively, we would have a much better chance of the peace outcome.
What we’re seeing now is that the humanitarian response for this year for Somalia alone is 2.4 million dollars. If we were to take only a percentage of that to look ecosystem restoration, mapping out nature-based solutions, as well as looking at the longer-term rehabilitation and re-wilding of certain areas, we would reduce the drought impact over the next 20 years by a certain percentage. I haven’t worked it out, but the science so far is showing that if we look at ecosystem restoration and work in certain areas, we would be able to reduce the longer-term impact. That’s what we’ve got to do at the same time as looking at these short-term life-saving interventions.
At the moment, there’s quite a lot of hope around this current government. There’s a real sense of trying to bring the different groups together. There’s quite a lot of interest in regional integration, and there’s a big focus on the government on climate change. The President was there at COP 27. There are a lot of really big investments in and political dialogues around climate and climate change. He really sees this as a big priority. I think in terms of state building, this is a great opportunity. The government obviously needs to really work on being able to have the right capacities and the right financial systems in place. A lot of those are working. The Federal Government is definitely on the right track.
We also need to really work on the local and district levels. That is really important. It’s those communities in those districts that are really at the front line of climate change and the impact of climate change. Unless we really focus on the adaptation of communities at that local level, we won’t see the peace dividends that we’re hoping to see. Unless communities have that ability and the resilience to deal with climatic impacts, then other militant groups can take advantage of it. This angle of really focusing on environmental peacebuilding, environmental security, water security, and energy security that falls under this sort of climate security hat, that’s really key.
We’ve seen it in other countries like Afghanistan, where unless we really focus on that community ability to adapt and community resilience to climatic events, then militant groups will take control. There has to be a balance to ensure really good capacity and capacity support at the federal level, but the real key here is at that local level on community-/district-level adaptation.
I didn’t answer that question before. I think CSOs and civil society are very driven. There’s a lot of very good CSOs working in very tough areas; CSOs are the ones that can work in gray areas of communities across the country. They’re often linked to some of the client systems and sometimes linked to the government systems as well. It can be a bit murky at the ground level. There are a lot of very well-resourced and functioning CSOs that are delivering a huge amount of work. They’re the ones often delivering most of the successful programming on the ground and often they’re linked to private sector. The private sector is a huge driver, and the Somali business sides are often the ones that are really delivering some of the solutions. We were working on the flood work recently, and the local businesses were the ones often just out there, working on the flood defense systems.
We as the UN are trying to work through all sides. We’re trying to work with CSOs, NGOs, community-based organizations, but also your local government and the federal government. So yes, it’s a mixture.
This is a very new field. It’s becoming more and more clear. I’m using SIPRI’s pathways of climate insecurity. Competition over resources in terms of livelihoods is one pathway.
The next one is displacement and movement of populations that are then causing further maladaptation and that maladaptation cycle is really interesting and one that we haven’t talked about—how people are displaced. And as they are displaced, they cut down trees, or they maladapt and then as that maladaptation happens, they further go into this cycle of climate displacement that’s leading to mass urbanization. That sort of pathway is still one we’re looking at. We do have some exciting projects, looking at early interventions in terms of areas that we know where people are likely displaced from. In those circumstances, if there is another climatic event, there would be interventions in terms of environmentally sound projects that will hopefully lead to rejection of displacement. But we’re also looking at environmental impact assessments. How do you change site planning around displaced sites, and how do you do mediation between host sites and displaced populations from an environmental perspective. So that’s another sort of angle that we’re looking at.
The third one is this armed actors group. We haven’t really talk much around how can we try to disrupt some of the armed actor work or the armed actors involved. It’s this localized legitimacy building that we’re trying to disrupt. How do you disrupt the legitimacy of environmental disputes. If you and I were having a dispute over water or land, the militant groups would come in and would provide swift justice. That’s where we’re looking at sort of environmental policing and how do you help provide environmental justice at the local level to try to disrupt some of that legitimacy building that armed actors are doing. On top of that, we know that armed actors are gaining quite a lot from the charcoal trade, from the water trade, the trucking of water, and the movement of goods. How do we try to disrupt that from a financial perspective so that we can try to reduce some of the financial gains for militant groups. So that’s another sort of angle that we’re trying to look at.
Those are three types of pathways that we’re looking at. From an academic perspective. how do we bring all that together? Two years on I’m still trying to create this framework around what do you do about climate security? We’ve got these three pathways that we’re trying to create specific programs and projects around. On top of that, how do you build the policy around climate security? How do you engage the office of national security, defense forces, and the army? How do you really bring them all together to think around this nexus between climate-sensitive security provision and conflict-sensitive adaptation? How do you really bring them together to make policy, programs, and actual activities on the ground? So there’s still some things we’re trying to build, but I think there’s still more work to be done.
It’s very difficult. That’s one of things we’re trying to figure out. Some of the indicators we’re looking at are not deep enough. Some of the things are in terms of the policies and guidelines and policy briefs. That doesn’t really give enough in terms of measures of success. But then there’s also peacebuilding, so the number of stabilization programs that are trying to have some sort of environmental angle to it is another indicator we’re looking at.
There are other things like reporting. The mission has standardized reporting tools, and we’re trying to incorporate climate angles or climate indicators into some of those reporting tools.
But the one that I find most interesting is we have stabilization indicators or stabilization tools that tries to look at when and how stable a district is. We look at it from that political and more social angle. What we’re trying to do is infuse or have indicators that are environmental in nature so that we can try to look at the stability of districts from an environmental angle to see whether, if we work on the environmental stability, how will that then translate to some of the overall peace outcomes of that district. Those are the things we’re trying to figure out, but we haven’t got there yet. It’s still very early days, and there’s a new stabilization plan that we’re trying to build in. There is the possible transition to government forces next year. So we’re sort of figuring out how do we try to incorporate some of these indicators into those new changes.
The learning is really around trying not to do too much. I’ve been brought into absolutely everything. The prioritization is absolutely key. I’ve been brought in to look at not only the climate security peacebuilding side, but I also look at like coordination around water and climate adaptation. That itself is its own role as well as the sort of climate security peacebuilding role. I’m also brought into how does the mission itself reduce its overall footprint and looking at the energy transition and energy security. There’s so many aspects of climate security that the learning is really how do you focus down on policy, coordination, and technical programming on the ground that really makes a big difference. There’s a lot of learning there, and I can now really show what type of policies and what type of work and support, the types of coordination systems that link climate adaptation, but also water, management and energy management.
We’ve already got now three really good programs that are trying to make some impact. We’re building the evidence. So it’s good.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author biography
Joshua W. Busby is a Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin. From 2021-2023, he served as a Senior Advisor for Climate at the U.S. Department of Defense. His most recent book is States and Nature: The Effects of Climate Change on Security (Cambridge University Press, 2022). He has a PhD in Government from Georgetown University.