The United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) are happy to present a webinar session on environmental peacebuilding on 2 December 2020, at 16:00 Geneva / 17:00 Nicosia time.

While environmental and climate change is affecting people worldwide, vulnerable population in fragile states are significantly more affected, which can contribute to the rise of existing tensions. Environmental peacebuilding offers a response to conflict through the effective governance and management of natural resources and the environment in support of peace.

Albert Martinez and Marie Schellens, from UNEP's Crisis Management Branch, will introduce the process of environmental peacebuilding, and elaborate on climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction practices for peacebuilding being implemented in Sudan and Nepal. Besides, the webinar aims to discuss the new possibilities of frontier technologies for environmental peacebuilding, and briefly present STRATA – UNEP's Earth Stress Monitor.

Albert Martinez is a climate security analyst at UNEP's Crisis Management Branch. His work involves coordinating environmental peacebuilding strategies to strengthen resilience to complex climate change and security risks in conflict-affected settings, and the management of these risks through policy and programme recommendations.Prior to joining UNEP, Albert conducted academic research on the socioeconomic impacts of the extractive industry, and coordinated an international marine conservation NGO in Spain.

Albert holds an MA in International Administration and Conflict Management from the University of Konstanz (Germany), an MSc in Political Science from the Pompeu Fabra University (Spain), and a BSc in Environmental Science from the University of Barcelona (Spain).

Marie Schellens works as an environmental security analyst at UNEP's Crisis Management Branch. She leads the theoretical and methodological development of Strata – the Earth Stress Monitor. Strata will be a web-based mapper that helps end-users to easily and rapidly identify where environmental and climate stresses are converging. It aims to support area-specific policy-making and programme planning around environmental and climate security.

Before joining UNEP, she was a Marie Curie PhD fellow at Stockholm University and the University of Iceland, researching the role of natural resources in conflict risk, with qualitative and quantitative tools from the field of complex systems. In October (2020), she successfully defended the PhD on natural resource conflicts. Marie also worked with ecosystem-based disaster risk reduction at UNESCO. She received a MSc in Geography jointly from KU Leuven and Free University Brussels (Belgium, 2015).

RSVP by 25th November to: unficyp-youthchampions@un.org