November was an eventful month for Strata, as the team had the opportunity to present the platform and engage with participants at various events.
The Strata team first took part in Geneva Peace Week (GPW), organised by the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform, on the theme “From seeds to systems of peace: Weathering today’s challenges”. Strata was featured as part of the GPW digital series, in which UNEP collaborated with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the Fragility, Conflict and Violence group of the World Bank (WB) to produce two podcast episodes on “Assessing the risks of climate change related conflict”. Strata was presented and discussed alongside the Weathering Risk initiative (adelphi and PIK) and tools for climate change and fragility (WB). Each of the three initiatives showed a distinct, state-of-the-art, data-driven approach to climate security modelling to support policy making and programming towards sustainable peace. The developers discussed with local peacebuilding practitioners the tools’ different challenges, complementarity and suitability.
In addition, UNEP joined the GPW roundtable session on “Effective Learning and Assessment Tools for Environmental Peacebuilding” co-organised with adelphi and Search for Common Ground. The moderated conversation improved collaboration and knowledge-sharing between climate scientists, conservationists, peacebuilding practitioners and other participants, who expressed their interest in having accessible tools and open-source climate change and conflict data for environmental peacebuilding and better decision making.
The Strata team also presented at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) under the Chatham House Virtual Pavillion on Climate Security. While the knowledge base on climate-related security threats is steadily increasing, this session emphasised sharing practical experiences and emerging lessons in addressing climate-related security risks in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. The format of the session was ‘the human library’, a set of interactive small group discussions that allowed speakers and participants to engage on equal levels.
On 17 November, Strata joined UNDRR and GFDRR’s Joint Workshop on Advancing Digital Public Goods for Disaster and Climate Risk Reduction. Strata contributed to the panel on fostering innovation of digital platforms and tools to meet the needs of the most vulnerable. Among many multidimensional risk data platforms discussed, Strata was the only one focusing on conflict-affected and fragile regions. A recording of the event is available here.
Lastly, Strata was presented at the Geo for Good Summit. The annual event, organised by Google within the framework of Google Earth Engine, brings together non-profits groups, scientists, government agencies and other change-makers using mapping tools and geospatial technologies to effect positive change. In the session, the Strata team argued that applications and datasets from earth observation are essential to identifying and tracking climate-related security risks. However, these analytics need to be more accessible and easy to use for climate-security practitioners and decision-makers. This is the gap that Strata aims to fill. The session recording is available here.
