The event took place on the margins of the “once in a generation” opportunity to reconfigure the multilateral governance system to better suit the needs of our more industrialized, digitalized, and globalized world at the Summit of the Future (SotF) in New York. This event aimed to reflect on the current “state of play” for practitioners and policymakers, including within the UN system and throughout the negotiations at the SotF and beyond, identifying existing gaps in current prevention, mitigation, and response measures. Stakeholders explored opportunities for better mainstreaming and coordination across the UN system to deal with environmental impacts and climate risks in conflict-affected and at-risk settings.
The current global governance system and its myriad of underpinning international agreements has so far been unable to keep pace with the increasing scale, speed, and complexity of the global catastrophic risks facing humanity. This has been made painfully apparent not only by the failure of the international community to halt large-scale environmental degradation and climate change, but also through the continued direct and indirect destruction of the environment by States and non-state armed groups in conflicts around the world. International prevention, mitigation, and response measures to conflict-linked environmental harm and climate risks in conflict-affected and vulnerable countries are currently ad hoc, incoherent, and uncoordinated across an overburdened and slowly responding system. This event gathered high-level representatives of governments, international organizations, and civil society to discuss potential pathways for the establishment and operationalization of the Environment, Peace and Security (EPS) agenda within the UN system beyond Pact negotiations.
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