Key Message

Conservation activities can contribute to, be affected by, and help resolve conflict.

Understanding and addressing the links between conservation and conflict can strengthen efforts to preserve ecosystems, enhance livelihoods and build peace.

Conservation and Conflict

How are Conservation and Conflict Linked?

What's New in Conservation and Conflict?

  • Conflict-Sensitive Conservation: Practitioners' Manual
    English (PDF - 15 MB) - Français (PDF - 14 MB)
    The Albertine Rift is one of the most biodiverse and ecologically unique regions of Africa. Sadly it has also been the site of some of the world's most violent conflicts in recent history. This turbulent context can pose a range of risks and opportunities to conservationists who are managing resources that can be both a seed of conflict and foundation for peace-building.

    With the financial support of the MacArthur Foundation and the technical support of the Conservation Development Centre, IISD has been working with the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Wildlife Conservation Society in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and CARE (Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere) International in Uganda to better understand the context in which they operate and apply a conflict lens to their work. This work led to the development of the "Conflict-Sensitive Conservation Practitioners' Manual," which provides an analytical and decision-making framework to help conservationists understand and address natural resource-based conflict, and integrate this understanding into conservation programming and implementation. In so doing, conservationists can avoid exacerbating conflict and maximize opportunities for peace-building.

Many of the world's high priority biodiversity hotspots are located in socially and politically unstable settings. As practitioners on the frontlines of environmental management, conservationists working in these areas are faced with conflict issues in a number of ways. For example, conservation activities can:

The links between conservation and conflict are complex, oftentimes shaped by a range of intervening factors such as history, identity, governance, regional politics and socio-economic trends. IISD has been working with conservation and development partners around the world in an effort to better understand these links and offer practical recommendations to conservationists dealing with conflict issues.

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