Towards Climate Resilient Peace: An Assessment of Climate Change Funding’s in Colombia

A growing body of scholarship has explored the link between climate change, natural resources and conflict. While considerable interest has been shown in examining how and under what circumstances climate change may increase a country’s risks of conflict, research exploring climate change response initiatives in fragile and conflict-affected contexts remains limited. Drawing from political ecology and ecological security literature, I understand climate resilience to be an intrinsic part of peace. This study explores and empirically tests if climate funding, through natural resource management practices, contributes to social cohesion and reduced environmental stress and, hence, peace. By doing a quantitative subnational analysis based on Colombia, I use a Fixed Effects regression model to test two hypotheses. While statistical evidence shows a positive and statistically significant relationship between climate change funding and negative peace, not enough evidence is found to support the second hypothesis linking it to environmental sustainability (as indicator of positive peace).