Nature of Peace

By Fariborz Zelli

Three weeks ago, the 16th conference of the parties (COP) to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) ended in the Colombian city of Cali. In the 32-year history of these biannual meetings, the negotiations during the Cali COP were remarkable in various regards, for both achievements and disappointments – and for similarities to the UN climate COP that took place in Baku only two weeks later.

1. The Official Negotiations: Making somewhat peace with Nature

What worked well…

Arguably the biggest success – and where the COP delivered mostly on its motto “Making Peace with Nature” – was the progress made on Article 8 (j) of the biodiversity convention. The article highlights the importance of traditional knowledge and practices, and hence directly relates to the role that indigenous and other local communities play for safeguarding biodiversity around the planet. With the headway made on these questions, the Cali COP has also vital implications for our Lund-based team’s research on the role of environmental human rights defenders (EHRD).

The discussions around Article 8 (j) had been key for the Colombian hosts around conference President and Colombian environmental minister Susana Muhamad as well as for the Colombian government under President Gustavo Petro. Thanks to the diplomacy of the COP leadership, delegates agreed in the final hours to establish a new subsidiary body to protect indigenous communities and local populations as defenders of nature. They further decided to acknowledge the role of people of African descent in the implementation of the biodiversity convention, going back to another initiative tabled by the conference hosts. 

With their decision the delegates created the precedent of placing a political organ dedicated to indigenous communities and human rights under the auspices of a global environmental institution – and they thereby recognize the strong overlaps between biodiversity and human rights. While the new subsidiary body now must be filled with life, its sheer establishment guarantees that concerns of indigenous and local communities will be more strongly integrated in discussions and decisions at future biodiversity COPs. Beyond the immediate context of the CBD, the body provides a new frame of reference with an institutional underpinning for EHRDs across the globe. Ideally, it can help facilitate a much-needed denser network of international and domestic law to protect indigenous and local communities in biodiversity hotspots.

This conference outcome is even more notable as Colombia is the country with the highest number of assassinations of EHRDs worldwide. This sad figure is, absurdly, connected to the country’s peace process, which had started in 2016 when an accord between the Colombian government and the FARC rebels ended an over fifty years long civil war. With the FARC giving up control over a large part of Colombian territory, the lands of indigenous, peasant, Afro-descendant and other local communities also became accessible to new threats, from legal and illegal mining to the expanded areas of operation of Colombian, Mexican and other international drug cartels. The new CBD subsidiary body will not be able to solve these problems fundamentally, but it may alleviate some of them – by more widely acknowledging the efforts that EHRDs in Colombia and elsewhere are making to protect nature in conjunction with their own cultures and livelihoods.

The Cali COP also saw progress on further important topics. This includes another agenda item of high relevance for indigenous and local communities, and for North-South relations in general. Delegates agreed on a new multilateral mechanism to fairly share the benefits from the use of genetic resources, and to do so based on genetic sequences of biodiversity stored in databases. Companies who use such digital sequence information (DSI) are now expected to pay a portion of their profits and revenues to the new ‘Cali Fund’. This would apply, for instance, when plant genetic resources with an origin in Sub-Saharan Africa or the Amazon are used by pharmaceutical companies in the Global North. Notably, 50% of the fund shall be allocated to indigenious peoples and local communities. Since the new mechanism is voluntary, however, companies are under no legal obligaton to compensate countries of origin or respective actors therein.

What didn’t work well…

Notwithstanding these and other positive results – e.g. on mainstreaming biodiversity into infrastructure, and, after eight years of negotiations, on a new process to identify ecologically significant marine areas – the Cali COP leaves behind a lot of unfinished business. No significant progress was made on two of biodiversity negotiations’ major bones of contention: 1) on implementing the new core of the CBD treaty family, the 27 goals of the 2022 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which had been adopted at the last COP in Montreal; and 2) on the financial mechanism and resources to support respective implementation efforts. Negotiators could not reach substantial agreement on neither of these two essential matters. In fact, with an increasing number of delegates leaving for their flights home, the COP plenary was no longer permitted to take any decisions in the final conference hours. Instead, the conference was suspended unceremoniously, with a resumed meeting expected to take place in the coming months. 

When it comes to the first controversial aspect of implementation mechanisms, delegates at Cali could not fill important gaps in the so-called “stocktake” – a global review process, which, by 2026, shall hold countries accountable for implementing the GBF. To be fair, this implementation and review gap of biodiversity negotiations is the consequence of a more fundamental problem that marks global environmental diplomacy today: a hollowing-out of what is actually multilateral in the respective treaties and agreements, with things not adding up.

Environmental diplomacy has never been easy, seeking to address systemic and complex problems while often being down-prioritised in comparison to international security or trade. Over the past ten years or more, however, we have been witnessing a particular trend in global environmental politics: Major negotiations provide ambitious but voluntary goals while not specifying what the specific contributions of each country, or at least some countries, to these goals should be (as was still the case e.g. in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change). Instead, each country may come up with their own individual implementation plans and objectives, which only undergo voluntary review processes and which, when added together, are far from reaching the overarching goals. 

The GBF with its ambitious, yet non-binding set of 27 targets is just the last prominent example for this logic of window-dressing of multilateral environmental deals. Others include the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the Paris Agreement on climate change with its 1.5°C goal, both adopted in 2015 and, like the GBF, built around ambitious and internationally renowned goals while leaving essential questions of individual country contributions and implementation out of the multilateral package. The voluntary country reports may bear different names and acronyms in these three contexts – VNRs (Voluntary National Reviews) for the SDGs, NDCs (nationally Determined Contributions) for the Paris Agreement, and NBSAPs (National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans) for the GBF. But with the first rounds of these reports coming in, they share similar degrees of disappointment: Based on the VNRs the 2024 SDG Report revealed that only 17% of the SDG targets were on track for 2030; summing up all NDCs we can no longer exclude the possibility of surpassing 2.9°C of global warming by 2100; and before CBD-COP16 more than 80% of the 196 parties to the GBF had missed the deadline to submit their revised NBSAPs. 

With this fixation on voluntary goals as the in-built problem of international environmental diplomacy today, it should not come as a surprise that the implementation gap is haunting COPs like the one in Cali. Negotiators and observers show a lot of good will and insight and discuss all sorts of mechanisms for implementation and review until the last minute, but these hardly find their way into decisions. 

The same window-dressing deja vu applies to financing, the second major contentious issue in Cali. Once again not unsimilar to climate negotiations (with e.g. the Green Climate Fund or the new Loss and Damage Fund), it is comparably easy for countries to agree on joint financial targets rather than on specific activities to keep these promises, e.g. on a mechanism like the Cali Fund on benefit sharing. Similar to major sets of targets like the GBF in 2022, a new fund makes for a presentable final conference result to the media. Yet, agreeing on a fund as such keeps more important and more sensitive modalities unaddressed, e.g. how much certain countries actually should and will contribute, or how voting rights on the use of the funds are distributed. An illustration of the divergent views on these specific questions is a 98-page-long non-paper published by delegation co-chairs at Cali, packed with wishlists on resource mobilization through 2030 that negotiators could not agree on. 

Taking this into account, the failure to establish a proper global biodiversity financing mechanism at Cali, no matter how superficial, is outright underwhelming. The CBD now must continue working with an interim trust fund, the 2023 Global Biodiversity Framework Fund, for which pledges have been comparatively low in Cali. With currently a bit over US$ 400, the fund falls significantly short of developed countries’ commitments to provide US$ 20 bn annually in international biodiversity financing by 2025. 

The story behind this failure is not only one of lack of willingness of developed countries to accept larger responsibility for global biodiversity loss. It is also a story of power and political control. In the absence of a proper CBD fund, the interim financing mechanism is operated by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a multilateral financial institution whose funds are administered by the World Bank and that has provided grants for environmental protection activities in developing countries since 1991. 

Funding decisions are taken by the GEF Council which consists of 14 members from developed countries, 16 from developing countries, and two from economies in transition – a constellation that allows donors to keep considerable control over where their money is going. By contrast, a global financing instrument for biodiversity under the authority of the COP, as conference President Susana Muhamad suggested on the last day in Cali, would have given developing countries a voting majority over these financial flows. By rejecting such an instrument, developed countries prioritised their control as donors over substantial progress on global biodiversity protection.

This outcome is even more underwhelming when taking into consideration that Cali negotiations were not severely affected by US elections. Unlike for the current climate COP in Baku where the US delegation is a lame duck, the Cali COP ended three days before Trump’s victory. Due to the missed opportunities at Cali, however, US elections will effectively have a big effect on this COP after all. Even though the US is not a party to the CBD, the incoming administration will cast a shadow on further negotiations, including at the resumed COP in a few months. For the next four years in general, we can expect a considerable drop in US support for UN environmental conferences and their goals, which will also impact the strategies of other parties. 

Connected to these disappointments on implementation and financing, the COP has suffered from typical rituals that have become familiar traits of multilateral environmental negotiations over the years. One of these is the who-blinks-first mentality of major negotiationg blocks. Negotiators often wait with major concessions on key issues until the last moments of a COP. This approach entails, first, all sorts of procrastinations during most of the two weeks of the conference, e.g. overproportionally long discussions about technical details, and second, a crescendo towards a melt-down and last-minute spree of decisions. As Cali has shown, this final act may even come too late when most seats in the theatre are already empty.  

Another ritual that can hit the brake on negotiations – and certainly did so in Cali – was the typical high-level segment in the second week of environmental COPs. When heads of states and environmental ministers join negotiations for a few days to address the COP plenary this may well serve to raise the global publicity of negotiations, and of these very heads of states and ministers themselves. However, this intermission of governmental leaders, a type of ‘COP inside the COP’, also tends to interrupt the actual negotiation efforts in the important final phase of the conference.

Related to this, backroom diplomacy at environmental COPs has considerably increased over the last years. To reinvigorate discussions on controversial issues, conference hosts happily act as honest brokers and summon a handpicked selection of country delegates or leaders behind closed doors. However, using such backroom diplomacy as an excessive element can also backfire, as it loses some of its magic and keeps the actual negotiations in waiting. In Cali, those closed doors did not even open in time before too many delegates had left town. 

2. Non-Governmental Engagement: Some People’s COP

What worked well…

COP President Susana Muhamad claimed that COP16 in Colombia will be remembered for being “La COP de la gente”, the people’s COP. She has a point with respect to the decisions on indigenous communities and local populations, but also with a view to the wider engagement of civil society and the local public. One of the highlights during the two weeks in Cali was the designated area for civil society activities, the so-called ‘Green Zone’. In recent years, organisers of environmental COPs often carefully choose to spatially separate this area the from official negotiation venue (the ‘Blue Zone’) – for security reasons, but certainly also to avoid disturbances by larger protests. Cali was no different in that regard, with the Blue Zone in a large conference centre on the north end of the city, and the Green Zone being placed in a park right in the heart of Cali. 

Nonetheless, a benefit of this spatial distance was that the local population took a much stronger interest in Green Zone activities and, especially during the first COP week, turned the zone into a festival of cultural encounters. Many indigenous associations and communities, mostly from Colombia, had come to Cali to present their traditions in numerous exhibits, but also to talk about their needs and the challenges they face in a series of side-events. In these they repeatedly stressed their delicate role as defenders and guards of biodiversity. They reminded listeners that in recent years the loss of primary forest in the Amazon has been significantly lower in indigenous than in non-indigenous territories. In defending their own livelihoods, these communities have become, intendedly or not, frontline implementers of the very Global Biodiversity Framework that negotiators were debating some kilometers further north. 

For many Colombians the Green Zone in Cali may have been the first major opportunity for direct exchanges on the indigenous heritage of their country, and about the various threats the respective communities are facing. These encounters and learning processes, one hopes, may contribute to a wider recognition and understanding of the role of environmental human rights defenders – and to preserving traditional ecological knowledge, lifestyles and cosmologies of these communities and their invaluable insights for preserving biodiversity. That alone would make this COP a success story, no matter what happened in the actual conference centre in the outskirts of the city.

What didn’t work well…

With 23,000 registered participants, 46% more than at the previous COP, Cali hosted the biggest biodiversity COP to date. While this number is dwarfed by attendance figures of UN climate conferences (85,000 in Dubai last year; 65,000 at the current COP in Baku), the steep increase from 2022 implied several challenges.

For one, the organization of side-events in the Blue and Green zones was far from optimal, if not outright overburdened. Blue Zone organisers accepted about a quarter of the ca.1,200 proposed events, but only published the selection and actual schedule about a month before the start of the conference. Green Zone organisers took the decision to shorten the original submission period for side-event proposals in the midst of application process. These organizational mishaps posed severe challenges to the activities and travel plans of many civil society actors, especially for those from developing countries. 

While figures went up for all types of attendants between the 2022 and 2024 COPs, they did so unproportionally for business and industry delegates. Most of these represented sectors like pharmaceuticals, fossil fuels, agrochemicals and pesticides, food and beverage processing and biotechnology. A total of 1,261 such delegates registered for the Cali COP, more than doubling business representation compared to the previous UN biodiversity summit in Montreal.

To get somewhere near reaching the GBF targets, it no doubt is essential to involve businesses across implementation activities. Without attracting investors and innovators, most of these activities will remain impossible. This notwithstanding, the soaring figures of business delegates raise some concerns. First, if this trend continues it will manifest a systemic imbalance among non-governmental actors in future COP representation, to the disadvantage of e.g. vulnerable communities or scientific institutions.

Second, certain lobbyists may seek to push back progress on key questions, as, for instance, many biotech representatives attempted around negotiations on the new benefit-sharing mechanism at COP16. And third, the large global attention that UN environmental summits are receiving also makes them welcome platforms for greenwashing. To put this carefully: it may have been advisable for organisers in Cali to gauge the possible consequences of business-showcasing in their events more cautiously beforehand. 

One example was the advertisement for Smurfit in Cali’s Humboldt House, which organized a total of 180 external events on culture and biodiversity during the COP. Smurfit-Kappa, Europe’s leading corrugated packaging company, has repeatedly been the target of severe accusations by indigenous and campesino communities in Colombia’s Cauca region. The communities are impacted by Smurfit-Kappa’s intensive monocrop pine and eucalyptus plantations and have been trying to reclaim their land from the company.   Another multinational met more resistance at Cali. The self-presentation the Canadian company Libero Cobre as a biodiversity champion provoked a protest rally by indigenous communities. The company had acquired four mining titles in southern Colombia in 2018 and since met protests by members of local Nasa and Inga communities for fear of groundwater contamination, forest loss, splitting the community and disregarding rights of prior informed consent. On another note, the Swedish embassy’s decision to host its official reception for Sweden-based COP participants in Cali’s local IKEA store may have raised quite a few eyebrows. 

3. The Way Forward – A Tale of two COPs

Many of the challenges mentioned, from implementation and financing gaps to ritualistic aspects, lobbying and greenwashing, have been haunting both UN biodiversity and climate negotiations for years. It thus does not come as a surprise that many of the reform suggestions that are made for UN climate summits are also applicable to biodiversity COPs. At the occasion of the ongoing UN climate COP in Baku, eminent politicians and researchers published an open letter with the Club of Rome in which they urged several reforms – and most of their suggestions sound as if they had been written for the biodiversity COP Cali. 

To address the ritualistic and last-minute showdown nature of COPs the authors recommend a “shift away from negotiations to the delivery of concrete action”. To achieve this, COPs could be transformed to smaller, but more frequent and solution-oriented meetings. Such a reform would give delegates more space and time to focus continuously on sensitive but essential modalities of financing and implementation, i.e. to actually fill the envelopes and go beyond superficial establishments on targets and funds. As for implementation, future meetings could ideally be supplemented by enhanced reporting and benchmarking mechanisms to monitor country progress continuously and hold countries accountable for reaching the GBF targets. More targeted COP meetings could direct more negotiating efforts towards criteria for disbursing funds and tracking mechanisms for financial flows, and thereby help overcome the current stalemate over a future biodiversity funding mechanism.

Another side-effect of smaller, more frequent and targeted COPs could be the equitable representation of non-governmental actors. Cutting back to a smaller presence of observers at the official Blue Zone altogether could go hand in hand with balancing figures among business, NGO and scientific representatives – without necessarily having to compromise on the scope of civil society activities in the Green Zone.

Various observers have also called for holding joint climate and biodiversity COPs in the future. Such an approach would have its benefits considering an increasing number of cross-cutting topics, from the impacts of climate change on biodiversity to the use of forests as carbon stocks or the protection of indigenous communities as environmental change agents. 

There are some caveats though, and not only given the current sizes of both types of conferences. As the last two world environmental summits – 2002 in Johannesburg and 2012 in Rio – have shown, negotiating too many sensitive aspects in one package may reduce the opportunity of any notable deal at all. Moreover, there is a risk that biodiversity questions are subordinated to certain concerns or logics in climate negotiations. For instance, the latter feature a larger set of market-based approaches like offsetting and tradable certificates. While quantifying carbon limitation efforts is a challenge, doing so for valuing biodiversity may be often impossible, or simply not desirable. One case in point that demonstrates this is the so-called REDD+ mechanism (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) under the UN climate regime. As of 2022 REDD+ activities covered more than 60% of the forest area in developing countries. While the mechanism values and quantifies the carbon storage aspect of forests (by covering opportunity costs of avoided deforestation), it side-lines other important forest functions. The merits of this mechanism notwithstanding, it exemplifies how core aspects of biodiversity are today negotiated from a climate perspective. 

Finally, the selection processes of future COP venues need to be overhauled. Delegates in Cali decided that the next CBD COP in 2026 will be held in Armenia. Notably, the main contender was Azerbaijan, the very host of the currently ongoing UN climate conference. To say the least, a UN biodiversity summit should not turn into a sideshow of geopolitical tensions between two neighbouring countries. What is more, as not only the current climate COP shows, the choice of venue can have a severe impact on the course of negotiations, and not always for the better. Praising fossil fuels as a “gift from God”, as Azerbaijani head of state Ilham Aliyev did in his inaugural address to the climate COP in Baku, has set an unfortunate tone for that meeting. 

The next biodiversity COP is now spared a similar fate and will not take place in a country where 90% of the export economy relies on oil and gas. Still, we need stricter eligibility criteria for future COP Presidencies. The Cali COP with its achievements on indigenous people and local communities demonstrated what a difference it can make to hold a COP in a mega-biodiverse country with an engaged host government. Let us hope for similarly sensible placements in the future. Addressing the sixth mass extinction is a too serious issue to be left to geopolitics and country greenwashing. 

Maria Andrea Nardi

The armed conflict between 1986 and 2007 in Northern Uganda had profound impacts on human rights and on the degradation of the natural environment. Unfortunately, peacetime did not revert this. On the contrary, the consolidation of extractive supply chains is bringing environmental deterioration to another scale while social conflicts are emerging among ethnic groups, local communities, families, and authorities around land access and tenure.

In 2007, while the peace talks were going on, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights made a number of recommendations to Uganda’s national authorities and the Uganda Human Rights Commission, including: “to ensure the integration of human rights and justice as key elements for sustainable peace” (1).

After the war, it has been claimed, the  Government of Uganda has made significant progress “to improve respect for human rights and the enjoyment of these rights by all individuals under its jurisdiction” (2) and to advance the “rule of law and democracy including ratification of key international and regional human rights instruments” (3).

Unfortunately, current environmental transformations in Northern Uganda are hindering that progress. Even though the rebels – the Lord Resistance Army (LRA) – are no longer active in the country, peace in the region is yet to be guaranteed.

Disputes over access to (and exploitation of) land and natural resources, as well as the resulting environmental degradation, are playing a key role in the future of peace in the eight sub-regions that make up the North region of the country.

In June 2020, I had a conversation with Patrick Okullo – journalist and environmental advocate based in Gulu, Acholi sub-region– and learned that during and after the war, environmental concerns were rising in the local agenda for peace. Unfortunately, this was not translated into an environmental peacebuilding policy. Journalists, NGO’s communities, and local authorities among others, are strongly advocating for environmental justice and human rights protection, for a sustainable peace in Northern Uganda.

In the following two sections, I share some of the key concerns we discussed with Patrick and complement with other sources such as those from local journalists and academic experts. In the final section, as a way of conclusion, I establish linkages between the protection of the natural environment and the protection, promotion, and fulfilment of human rights in the context of Uganda.

The emergence of ‘new’ natures and supply chains during war

For a period of about twenty years, Uganda witnessed its most prolonged armed conflict between a rebel army (LRA) and the national security forces – the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF). Even though different sources contest the final number, in 2004 it was estimated that 1.4 million persons were pushed from their homes into internal displaced people’s camps (IDP camps) (4) in order to facilitate UPDF’s surveillance and securitize the most conflictive districts: those of Acholi sub-region (former districts of Gulu, Kitgum and Pader).

Patrick Okullo recalls that during the armed conflict, the Ugandan security forces arrived in the North to reach the LRA rebels seeking to deter their violence towards civilians and stabilise the situation. This was done by the construction of roads crossing forests and savannahs. In the process of implementing these strategies, natural resources were discovered by these actors coming from other regions of Uganda. Logging and trading of valuable tree species, such as the Africana Afzelia started then, when the security forces accessed unexplored forests. At the same time, they had access to natural resources in “abandoned” rural areas, as Patrick recalls:

“…in the process, when people were in the camps, when in [1996] they left their homes and  were confined in the camps, the security forces, the LRA and the UPDF they had access to these areas, they would exploit whatever they could in terms of natural resources, this contributed to degradation”.

Environmental and forest degradation started during war, with the emerging trend of logging of valuable species for trading, small-scale charcoal production and tree cutting for other purposes (such as building) for household consumption.

The high number of people living in camps resulted in an uneven spatial distribution of natural resources exploitation in the Northern sub-regions, highly concentrated in the camps and around them, as those living there “resorted to cutting of trees, for charcoal burning, for fuelling, for cooking. This also contributed to high level of degradation”, according to Patrick (see also 5).

In 2005, the USAID and the Wildlife Conservation Society sponsored a comprehensive study on the impact of the armed conflict on the environment and natural resources management in Northern Uganda (6). Based on mixed-methods and the use of remote sensing technology to study vegetation cover in the country, the report affirms that:

“In north eastern Uganda there has been a net loss of woodland (…). Around urban centres loss of woody cover was particularly high, although for Gulu and Kitgum this was confined to the immediate vicinity of the town and around IDP camps. Around Lira  there has been widespread loss of woody cover, which may be partly a result of the conflict (people migrating south) but also due to expanding human population and conversion of natural habitat to farmland” (6: 9-10). [*]

The paradox is, nevertheless, that the armed conflict worked also as a driver for environmental protection. The study shows that vegetation was also restored in some of those territories where the LRA rebels were based, or with no easy access. This might be explaining the higher level of environmental conservation: “[t]here is a large belt of increased woody cover west and north of Kitgum where the LRA has been most active and as a result it is clear that there has been some recovery of natural habitat as a result of the conflict” (6: 9).

The causes of vegetation change need to be further explored on the ground. The internal armed conflict has been a clear driver of vegetation change, but other factors might be explaining this, such as climate change or population growth (expansion of urban settings and/or farming land).

The report argues, however, that “it is clear that the movement of large numbers of people to IDP camps has allowed vegetation to recover in areas they have vacated and has led to degradation of vegetation around the camps and urban centres where they have settled” (6: 10). This explains the uneven geographical distribution of environmental degradation and conservation.

New conflicts and environmental deterioration during peacetime

Environmental degradation did not decrease after the armed conflict and during peacebuilding. On the contrary, it intensified. Savannahs and forests restored, turned into a source of rich timber to be exploited during peacetime. TNH (2012) observes that this is particularly the case because those regions previously supplying Kampala were totally depleted (7).

From 2007, once the violence against civilians deescalated and people started leaving the camps, Northern Uganda became the scene of the expansion of charcoal production and high-value timber extraction for distant markets such as those in Kampala, Kenya or China.

According to the Ministry of Water and Environment from Uganda (2016), during the period 2010-2015, an estimated number of 250,000 hectares of forest were lost. In the same period, forest estate outside protected areas reduced from 61% in 2005 to 38% in 2015 (8).

The resettlement process brought people back to their land, but with much need to complement their meagre incomes, as farming and husbandry take time to give a produce. Livestock had been wiped out from the region as a result of the war (9) so people had to restart their livelihoods. This partly explains the resulting land use change and ecological degradation that we are witnessing now.

Charcoal production and high-value timber species

During the post conflict and peacebuilding period, new and powerful actors arrived in the North and scaled up natural resource extraction and trade (10), not only for valuable timber logging but also for charcoal production.

This ‘industrial’ or large-scale charcoal production incorporated small-scale farmers and other rural dwellers into an international supply chain, highly extractive and dependent on natural resources, further marginalising local communities from their natural resources and livelihoods and/or inserting them at the bottom of emerging international supply chains.

Patrick Okullo explains that the levels of degradation and conflict intensified between 2015 and 2019: “hundreds of trucks would pass day and night from the Acholi sub-region and part of West Nile down South to Kampala”.

He further clarifies that trees such as shea nut or African Afzelia play an important role in the cultural life of Acholi people, who suffer in their territory much of the impacts of the armed conflict. This is why local chiefs, and other cultural institutions are worried to see how these trees are decreasing in number, as people will not only miss food and shelter, but cleansing rituals that are very important for the life in community, peace building and conflict resolution. Cultural leaders understood that failure to protect precious trees would affect in the future local peoples’ culture as these species have a key role in the reproduction of social life.

Access to land

New conflicts emerged during the post-conflict between local leaders, communities, clans, ethnic groups and families due to contested land ownership, district borders, soil degradation, land use change, over exploitation or access to local forests, among other issues related to the natural environment (11; 12).

Patrick Okullo recalls that “after the war the owners of those lands where camps were established were appealing to the government to support them, to compensate them, because the camps were established in their lands, and the natural resources were highly destroyed”.

The fragile land tenure and unstable land access pushed people to cut down trees as they were unsure for how long they would have access to natural resources. This has further accelerated the degradation process, according to different sources (10).

In this context, the arrival of investments for oil exploration and exploitation, and agribusiness –such as sugar cane or cattle ranching- has exacerbated conflicts between those supporting one or another livelihood and/or land use (13, 14, 15). Wildlife conservation in natural parks and reserves has also brought conflicts between local dwellers and authorities (16).

Role of the local district authorities

Local district authorities realised the need to address these urgent matters and understood – Patrick shares – that if tree cutting continues, acute weather changes would occur, affecting the soil humidity or quality and abundance of water and in the long term this will affect agriculture production, cattle raising, and other important livelihoods directly dependent on natural resources and ecosystem services (such as fisheries).

This explains that local district authorities for the entire Acholi sub-region came together and passed a bill in 2016 to control charcoal trade and the movement of timber from one place to another (17). This ordinance seeks to regulate the transportation of timber making it illegal to move it around without the corresponding documents from the authorities.

According to Patrick, “now that the authorities have been enforcing new control mechanisms, tree cutting is decreasing and less timber is leaving the region”. It seems at least, that illegal charcoal trade might be decreasing (18) though this is contested (19). In addition, “they are currently drafting a charcoal policy to address alternative sources of energy for households”, Patrick tells me.

Human rights and the environment: building sustainable peace

It has been argued by many that the armed conflict in Northern Uganda began as a consequence of the historical economic and political marginalisation of the region from the rest of the country (20). The armed conflict brought violence to people and to their natural environment, the violation of all kinds of human rights.  

Even though the armed conflict is over, peacetime unfortunately is not completely free of violence. Nowadays, violence against people continues in an indirect way: against their nature, their natural environment. It might not be exactly the same actors perpetuating it, but there is no doubt that the role of the Ugandan security forces is still relevant. As Branch & Martinello (2018: 242) put it “charcoal production, and its particular destructiveness, should be understood as a continuation of the violence of the 1986–2006 war between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Ugandan government” as “[m]ilitarized, forceful displacements of communities by the state, whether for minerals, game reserves, parks, infrastructure, agri-business, or personal accumulation, are often enforced through military violence” (p. 248) (10).

Ecological degradation and environmental deterioration during the armed conflict was the result of the activity of few actors (e.g. army officials, camps dwellers) and it was very much localised (e.g. around the camps) (6). The geographical scale of environmental deterioration during peacetime has changed: it has increased. The network of stakeholders became more complex, bringing together diverse actors within and outside the Northern region (7, 10, 19).

It can be argued that peace succeeded in inserting the region in national and international markets – as provider of natural resources – and bringing certain levels of economic growth and development. Nevertheless, this is not experienced equally by most of the population who see their natural environment depleted and receive little benefit from this ‘development’.

These complexities and the emerging inequalities pose the challenge of coordinating political efforts to revert the situation and implement policies and strategies to promote human rights, environmental restoration, and sustainable development.

Uganda finds inspiration in international, regional and national standards and instruments to promote peace, environmental protection and human rights. There is, for instance, a resolution by the African Commission from 2012 calling for a Human Rights-Based Approach to Natural Resources Governance (21) urging member states among other issues to “[e]nsure that respect for human rights in all matters of natural resources exploration, extraction, toxic waste management, development, management and governance, in international cooperation, investment agreements and trade regulation prevails”.

The country – it is claimed – has made progress in domesticating human rights standards and incorporating environmental concerns in its legislative frameworks.  The Constitution of Uganda in article 39 provides that every citizen has the right to a clean and healthy environment; and since 2019, the Ugandans have a national law to protect the natural environment and regulate how it should be used: the National Environment Act. In fact, there are many acts, policies and plans at the central level dealing with the promotion of sustainable use of the natural environment and nature protection, such as those dealing with biodiversity, wildlife, forestry, tree planting, water, wetlands or land.

Local and central authorities also play a key role in the protection of human rights and the environment, with the creation of bills and policies, such as the drafting of the Acholi Sustainable Charcoal Production and Marketing Bill from 2019 (22).

In this context, I argue that the ‘problem’ is not the lack of environmental or human rights recognition or legislative frameworks, but the way these are implemented (or silenced). I am referring not only to environmental interventions, but also to human rights ones.

Human rights interventions I have in mind are those that go hand in hand with environmental protection and ecological restoration. The natural environment cannot be left aside in planning, designing, implementing, monitoring, or evaluating human rights strategies. Such strategies should work towards political empowerment, sustainable development, and peace for all, and particularly for those more in need. They should be attentive of not (re)producing conflicts.

Branch (2011: 9) points out that “human rights intervention may inadvertently provide the tools for emancipatory politics, politics possibly based upon concepts of human rights that imply and depend on individual and collective social and political agency” (23).  I believe that the role of journalists and civil society in denouncing environmental injustices and/or human rights violations are central in promoting a real implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the existing international and national laws and policies. Members of diverse organisations of the civil society with support from (and despite of) the international community are nowadays active in denouncing the ongoing environmental deterioration (24) and human rights abuses in Uganda.

The question remains then for the different authorities in Uganda and for Ugandan peoples to collectively discuss and decide how they wish the Northern region to be integrated to the rest of the country and the global economy, how to promote alternative sources of energy, and how to restore degraded natural environments, while promoting, protecting and fulfilling human rights for all.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Patrick Okullo for his time to chat and enlighten me about his work and worries from those living in Acholi and other sub-regions in the North of Uganda. I extend my gratitude to my colleagues Kasiva Mulli, Yvonne Oyieke and Alice Kasznar for their feedback to draft versions of this blog-post.

Notes

[*] Lira is a town in Lango sub-region, which has also been affected by the armed conflict as IDP camps were located there.

References

(1) HRC (2007) “Report on the work of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Uganda”, Report of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and follow-up to the World Conference on Human Rights Addendum. Human Rights Council. A/HRC/4/49/Add.2. Available online here.

(2) OHCHR (2013) “Report on the Activities of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Human Rights Situation in Uganda”, Nov. 2011 to Sept. 2013. Available online here.

(3) HRC (2016) National report submitted in accordance with paragraph 5 of the annex to Human Rights Council resolution 16/21. Uganda. Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review Human Rights Council. Available online here.

(4) UN (2004) “Specific groups and individuals. Mass exoduses and displaced persons”, Report of the Representative of the Secretary-General on internally displaced persons, Deng, Francis. Mission to Uganda. Economic and Social Council, United Nations. Commission on Human Rights. E/CN.4/2004/77/Add.1. Available online here.

(5) Oroma, Gladys (2008) “The forgotten ‘victim’ of the northern Uganda war”, news article in Daily Monitor Only (Uganda) June 4. Available online here.

(6) Nampindo, Simon; Picton-Phillipps, Guy & Plumptre, Andrew (2005) The impact of conflict in Northern Uganda on the environment and natural resource management, USAID and Wildlife Conservation Society. Available online here.

(7) TNH (2012a) “Charcoal boom a bust for forests”, news article in The New Humanitarian (formerly IRIN News). 7 February. Available online here.

(8) Ministry of Water and Environment (2016) “State of Uganda’s Forestry”. The Republic of Uganda. Available online here.

(9) Owiny, Tobbias Jolly (2020) “LRA war victims beat odds to succeed in dairy farming”, news article in Daily Monitor. 18 August. Available online here.

(10) Branch, Adam & Martiniello, Giuliano (2018) “Charcoal Power: The Political Violence of Non-Fossil Fuel in Uganda”, in Geoforum, 97: 242-252. Online here.

(11) TNH (2012b) “Land disputes threaten northern peace”, news article in The New Humanitarian (formerly IRIN News). 19 April. Available online here.

(12) Otim, Denis Barnabas (2012a) “Uganda: Local land dispute threatens violence”, blogpost in Peace Insight. 27 December. Available online here.

(13) Otim, Denis Barnabas (2012b) Is it oil, land or investment triggering increasing land dispute in Lakang village of Amuru district? Situation report. Refugee Law Project, School of Law, Makerere University and Advisory Consortium on Conflict Senstivitiy (ACCS). Available online here.

(14) Otim, Denis Barnabas (2012c) “Dealing with land conflicts in Amuru, Uganda”, blogpost in Peace Insight. 13 Noviembre. Available online here.

(15) Otim, Denis Barnabas (2013) “Uganda: Investors must involve the locals in acquiring land for investment”, blogpost in Peace Insight. 04 March. Available online here.

(16) Taylor, Liam (2019b) “’This is our land’: Uncertain future for Ugandans facing eviction from wildlife reserve”, news article in Thomson Reuters Foundation. 23 July. Available online here

(17) Kitara, Jackson (2018) “Environment committees to fight charcoal burning”, news article in New Vision. 20 July. Available online here.

(18) Muhumuz, Rodney (2019) “Africa’s charcoal trade is decimating fragile forest cover”, news article in The Associated Press (AP). September 25. Available online here.

(19) Owiny, Tobbias Jolly (2019) “Why illegal logging, charcoal burning persists in the north”, news article in Daily Monitor. 3 November. Previously available online here.

(20) Doom, Ruddy & Vlassenroot, Koen (1999) “Kony’s Message: A New Koine? The Lord’s Resistance Army in Northern Uganda”, in African Affairs 98 (390): 5-36. Available online here.

(21) ACHPR (2012) Resolution on a Human Rights-Based Approach to Natural Resources Governance, African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Available online here.

(22) Labeja, Peter (2019) “Acholi Region Drafts Charcoal Policy”, news article in Uganda Radio Net (URN). 20 February. Available online here.

(23) Brach, Adam (2011) Displacing Human Rights: War and Intervention in Northern Uganda. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Available online here.

(24) Taylor, Liam (2019a) “’Cutting everything in sight’: Ugandans vow to curb rampant deforestation”, news article in Thomson Reuters Foundation. 12 March. Available online here.