Convened at the 4th International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding (EnPAx), Ottawa, 19 June 2026.
This in-person roundtable was co-facilitated by the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and the Climate and Environment Charter for Humanitarian Organizations to explore the relevance of climate security to humanitarian action and the role humanitarians can play in local peacebuilding while holding to their mandates. The roundtable was part of the 4th International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding, which brought together a range of practitioners and academics at the intersection of environment, peace and conflict. The notes below reflect the discussion, held under Chatham House rules.
Climate, conflict and displacement are all part of one lived reality. Participants working in conflict-affected and disaster-prone settings described these as simultaneous, recurring conditions rather than separate problems. Local partners and communities themselves already integrate these forms of work, and the silos are often imposed by donors and international organisations.
The interactions of resource scarcity, climate shocks and environment degradation on peace and security are very visible in the work of humanitarians – and they are already working to address them. Humanitarians see their role in working with communities to adapt how they work, based on what the community needs. Approaches shared included
Climate insecurity is not limited to fragile and conflict-affected contexts. Climate pressures can also lead to the slow erosion of societal structures and resilience, not just acute conflicts and violence. In many contexts the central threat is the gradual breakdown of social cohesion under economic, social and political pressure of climate-related crises. It is a quiet kind of climate insecurity that does not match standard conflict or crisis definitions, making it easy to overlook and out of scope of many initiatives. On the flip side, climate pressures can also pull communities together, linking to the environmental peacebuilding co-benefits of cooperative responses.
Structural barriers for partnerships and funding remain. Funding silos were named as a core structural obstacle: even where “nexus” language is used, donor categories for humanitarian, development and peace work stay separate. This creates difficulties for collaboration between humanitarians and peacebuilding actors under the same grant where grant structures disallow sharing of funding across sectors.
Participants noted that geopolitical priorities skew some funding flows toward high-profile crises while other contexts are neglected, and other funding – often for climate action – is less accessible in fragile and conflict-affected settings. Counter-terrorism-financing regulation in some donor countries has blocked funds from reaching areas governed by listed entities. Humanitarian exemptions in some contexts are now emerging, which can be an opportunity for environmental peacebuilding communities, but access gaps still remain.
International programming needs to reflect on power dynamics, language and local knowledge. International actors largely set the terminology and knowledge frameworks at the intersection of environment, climate and conflict, which local organisations then adopt to access funding even where they do not match ground realities. Participants emphasized the importance of traditional and indigenous knowledge, including through locally led knowledge hubs, and urged international actors to engage in partnership models that learn from local actors rather than training them.
This roundtable was part of a series of engagements on the roles and perspectives of humanitarians in climate security, convened by the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and the Climate and Environment Charter for Humanitarian Organizations, with various partner organizations. If you are interested in participating in these conversations, please get in touch with secretariat@climate-charter.org