Regenerative Adaptation: A Path for Future Environmental Peacebuilding?

Sep 18, 2026 | Richard Marcantonio
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Violent conflicts are becoming more frequent and more intense in parallel with growing global environmental change, extreme weather events, and corresponding risks to human health and social systems. Both phenomena and their effects are shaped by the relative vulnerability of regions, communities, and individuals. Recent scholarship has identified the high spatial coincidence of multiple environmental risks—climate stressors, resource extraction, and toxic pollution—with human conflict and migration (Cabanillas et al., forthcoming). Such situations can be conceptualized as polycrisis: the causal entanglement of crises in multiple global systems whose cumulative effects at the local level significantly degrade humanity’s prospects. Framing and evaluating complex environment-conflict-peace problems through a polycrisis lens underscores the imperative for more effective environmental peacebuilding responses.