Margot Wallström, former Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs, introduced SIPRI’s Environment of Peace initiative during her keynote address to the ‘Workshop on Climate, Peace and Security: How to Operationalize Principles on Environmental Peacebuilding’, held in Seville, Spain, on 9–10 December.
‘The security trends and environmental trends we see today are combining in ways that threaten the stability of societies and nations,’ said Wallström, who chairs the international expert panel guiding the initiative. ‘This confluence of security and environmental crises, together with a deficit of governance, is the jumping-off point for our project, Environment of Peace.’
She went on to outline the structure and aims of the Environment of Peace report, which will be launched at the Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development in May 2022. She also noted that the report hopes to inform the Stockholm+50 conference, which takes place in June 2022. She called Stockholm+50 a ‘date with history’, marking 50 years since the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972.
Watch the keynote speech here.
The workshop on climate, peace and security was organized by the ministries of foreign affairs of Finland, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Spain, Casa África, and the European Union External Action Service, in collaboration with Conama, the Berghof Foundation, the Metropolitan Water Supply and Sanitation Company of Seville (EMASESA) and the European Institute of Peace.
Read more about the Environment of Peace initiative. Watch Margot Wallström and other panellists discussing the initiative and their involvement in it on SIPRI’s YouTube channel.