"Can we get beyond the point where environment and conflict always has to be a story of tragedy with no happy ending?" asked Achim Steiner at the March 24, 2009, launch of From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment, a new report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

"I think we actually can provide a critical set of building blocks that would allow us to be not just lamenters on the sidelines," but active problem-solvers, said Steiner, UNEP's executive director. UNEP would like to put "green advisers, so to speak, with blue helmets" to examine peacebuilding "from an environmental, natural resource restoration point of view" and "minimize the potential for conflicts to escalate again," said Steiner, who recently met with Alain Le Roy, UN undersecretary-general for peacekeeping operations, to discuss plans for embedding environmental advisers with UN peacekeeping troops.

Steiner was joined by Daniel Reifsnyder, deputy assistant secretary for environment at the U.S. State Department, and Andrew Morton, manager of UNEP's Disasters and Conflicts Programme, to discuss the report's findings.

Natural Resources and the Conflict Continuum

According to From Conflict to Peacebuilding:

• Forty percent of intrastate conflicts within the past 60 years have been strongly linked to natural resources.
• Such conflicts are twice as likely to relapse within the first five years of peace.
• Less than a quarter of peace agreements for these conflicts address natural-resource issues.

Environmental factors can contribute to conflict and subvert peace in three main ways:

1. The inequitable distribution of resource wealth, competition for scarce or valuable resources, and environmental degradation can contribute to the outbreak of conflict.
2. Natural resources can used as "a financing vehicle for conflict—sustaining conflict well beyond the point where conflict has its origin, to actually having become part of an at-war economy, a conflict economy," Steiner said.
3. Unresolved environmental issues can subvert peace negotiations, especially when warring parties have a stake in lucrative resources. If we do not understand "how environment and natural resources can undermine very volatile peace agreements," Steiner warned, we can "find ourselves back where we started off from."

• Assess the natural-resource and environmental issues underlying conflicts.
• Monitor and address natural-resource use in conflict areas.
• Incorporate resource-sharing agreements into peace deals.
• When cooperation is not possible, use punitive measures to end resource exploitation.