Environmental Provisions in Formal Peace Agreements: What Does the Literature Say?

As rates of conflict and environmental risk increase, peace agreements offer a unique occasion to reach accord on both fronts. A systematic review of peer-reviewed articles published in the last decade reveals that little research has been conducted on the presence of environmental provisions in peace agreements, and that such provisions, where they are mentioned in scholarly literature, are often vague and poorly implemented. As the environmental risks of both conflict and post-conflict prosperity are well documented, multi-level management structures for these risks formalized in peace agreements may be helpful in mitigating them. What role peace agreements currently play and may play in the future in establishing provisions to achieve this aim deserves further investigation. This review identifies key trends in the direct and tangentially related peer-reviewed journal articles on environmental provisions in peace agreements. The identified trends are then used to develop recommendations for future investigation in order to build the empirical evidence base and best practices for the inclusion of environmental provisions in formal peace agreements.