By Alex Belyakov

You and Project Save the World are Working on the Same Issues, so Let’s Get Acquainted

The debate is over. The environment is a peace issue. For too long, we have treated war, climate change, and planetary destabilization as separate crises. They are not. The damaged areas can also become sites of cooperation. That is the focus of environmental peacebuilding, a field that has moved beyond theory and is now entering a more mature, action-oriented phase.

Environmental peacebuilding brings together research and practice that use shared natural resource management, climate interventions, and responses to environmental threats to prevent conflict, reduce violence, support recovery, and build sustainable peace. It is both practical and visionary: practical because it works in real communities under stress (like Ukraine or Iran), and visionary because it asks us to rethink peace itself, not merely as the absence of war, but as the presence of justice, resilience, and ecological stewardship.

The Environmental Peacebuilding Association (EnPAx), now with more than 500 members in 90 countries, addresses many of the same topics as Project Save the World. We should get acquainted, and we’ll soon have a chance, for the Fourth International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding will meet at the University of Ottawa from June 16–19. See https://www.environmentalpeacebuilding.org/.

SECURITY AND KNOWLEDGE – BY AND FOR WHOM?

The convention will examine climate migration, extractivism, emerging technologies, and the energy transition and will confront two hard questions: who gets to define security, and whose knowledge counts? EnPAx now connects members working on governance, climate change, displacement, law, gender, and more (https://enpax.org
). Its newsletter and the Journal on Environment and Security ensure that lessons from the field reach policymakers and practitioners.

They’re launching a new encyclopedia, Essential Concepts of Environmental Peacebuilding: An A-to-Z Guide (Routledge, June 2026) with more than 180 entries. Its glossary has terms translated into ten languages: from Arabic and Chinese to Ukrainian and Yoruba. Everything will be fully open access. That matters. Knowledge should not be gated when the stakes are planetary.

Peace work has too often been compartmentalized, while environmental work has too often ignored power. Environmental peacebuilding bridges that gap. Peace is as much about ending war as it is about learning how to live together on a damaged Earth. Canada and Project Save the World are joining in this conversation.

Alexander Belyakov, Ph.D., is a Toronto-based sustainability excellence professional. https://alexbelyakov.com