Research collaboration empowers regional university to promote peace and climate resilience in former rebel strongholds in the Philippines’ Mindanao region.
In the Mindanao region, climate change and post-conflict tensions challenge people’s livelihoods. The CGIAR Research Initiative on Climate Resilience (ClimBeR) and Mindanao State University (MSU) have researched potential solutions and launched a new community of practice on climate security and environmental peacebuilding. Their partnership has landed MSU a seat on an influential committee tasked with reintegrating conflict-affected communities into society. This role allows MSU to draw on joint research and inform proposed interventions to foster both peace and climate resilience.
People living in the Mindanao Island group in the Philippines are under constant threat from climate hazards such as typhoons, floods, landslides, and droughts. At the same time, they are grappling with inter-clan feuds, violence, and illegal economies, all of which are lingering effects of a decade-long armed conflict.
Life is particularly challenging for people living in former rebel strongholds where the Moro Islamic Liberation Front ran operational bases until a formal peace agreement was signed in 2014. In these areas, which continue to house large numbers of former combatants, residents are now contending with both the impacts of climate change and post-conflict tensions.
To foster peace and climate resilience in this region, the CGIAR Research Initiative on Climate Resilience (ClimBeR) partnered with the Mindanao State University’s Iligan Institute of Technology (MSU-IIT). In 2023, ClimBeR and MSU-IIT conducted fieldwork to collect communities’ views on how climate change impacts are linked to risks of insecurity.
Community members highlighted, for example, that poor management of increasingly scarce resources increases the risk of conflict and violence. However, they also suggested boosting their climate resilience and social cohesion through conflict-sensitive and climate-smart agriculture and conflict-sensitive fisheries management.
To reflect on the communities’ proposed solutions, ClimBeR organized a workshop that gathered 24 experts, representing humanitarian, development, and academic institutions. Through their discussions, the participants zeroed in on how improved management of natural resources could help build peace—an approach known as environmental peacebuilding. They identified ten potential entry points to environmental peacebuilding—such as enabling previously feuding groups to collectively harvest crops from conflict zones—that ClimBeR and MSU-IIT published in a joint whitepaper.
At this event, ClimBeR researchers also laid the foundation for a new community of practice on climate security and environmental peacebuilding. It is now led by ECOWEB—a local non-profit working to address conflict, climate change impacts, and more—and by three regional universities: MSU-IIT, Caraga State University, and Agusan del Sur State University College of Agriculture and Technology.
Since then, MSU-IIT researchers have taken up tools and approaches introduced by ClimBeR—such as analyzing climate change impacts through a gender lens—and have included environmental peacebuilding in the institute’s curriculum.
Thanks to MSU-IIT’s partnership with ClimBeR on environmental peacebuilding research, and its leadership in establishing a community of practice, the institute was also invited onto an influential committee tasked with so-called localized normalization implementationhe committee develops initiatives to reintegrate into society the communities living in the six areas of Mindanao that are officially labeled as former rebel strongholds.
Through this role, MSU-IIT researchers aim to influence the committee’s decision-making when it considers proposals for interventions related to livelihoods. By drawing on the research conducted jointly with ClimBeR, they encourage the committee to repackage proposed livelihood programs so that they also foster climate resilience and peace.
For example, by focusing on fostering economic co-dependency through the trade of agricultural raw materials and products, communities that were previously feuding over natural resources such as land have found common ground.
Overall, the credibility rendered to MSU-IIT through the collaboration with ClimBeR has opened doors: MSU-IIT has been invited into national conversations on the climate change, environment, and conflict nexus, including by the University of the Philippines.
Finally, when in early 2024, Philippine authorities approached MSU-IIT researchers, requesting their input on how to both foster agricultural livelihoods and peace in the former rebel strongholds, MSU-IIT turned to ClimBeR to develop a joint proposal. The proposal, which is currently under review, outlines a five-year program that would require a 1 peso (approximately USD 1,700,000) investment and could benefit up to 60,000 people.
“The fact that we are the only academic institution that is part of the committee for localized normalization implementation is thanks to our collaboration with ClimBeR and our joint research outputs. [W]e needed a credible voice, and that’s what this collaboration gave us,”
Mark Anthony Torres, acting director, Institute for Peace and Development in Mindanao at the Mindanao State University’s Iligan Institute of Technology (MSU-IIT).
