Impact Synthesis: Yemen Project

After more than ten years of armed conflict, worsening environmental degradation and intensifying climate impacts are compounding the war in Yemen, straining natural resources and weakening public authorities' capacity to manage them. This impact synthesis, developed by the European Institute of Peace (EIP) and adelphi, draws on an evaluation of the Environmental Pathways for Reconciliation (EPfR) project (late 2022 to September 2026) to assess how environmental and climate security concerns can serve as an entry point for conflict resolution and reconciliation. The report covers:

• Project context, outlining how a decade of conflict has degraded infrastructure, farmland and natural resource governance in Yemen, and how EPfR works across community, technical and national levels to respond.
• Key outcomes, including a national consultation across 13 governorates that built a mandate for integrating environmental concerns into peace efforts, community dialogues that built trust and informal agreements on local environmental risks, technical dialogues between national-level parties that used water scarcity as a shared entry point for cooperation, and integrated assessments that informed decision-making by the UN Special Envoy to Yemen and other actors.
• Lessons on integrated programming, covering how dedicated dialogue on shared environmental concerns provides a less politicised foundation for trust and cooperation, how inclusive dialogue surfaces local priorities that can feed into high-level peace processes, how environmental peacemaking creates engagement opportunities for women and other underrepresented groups, how integrated analysis produces implementable recommendations, and how anchoring projects in issues rather than parties helps them withstand volatile political contexts.
• Recommendations, addressed to practitioners and policymakers, on supporting dedicated multi-level dialogue platforms, enhancing local ownership and feedback loops between local and national processes, mandating gender-responsive programming, treating environmental and conflict analysis as shared, ongoing evidence, and allowing flexible, adaptive project design in volatile conflict settings.

Learn more about the project "Environmental pathways for reconciliation in Yemen" here.