The Integration Dividend: How Connecting Climate, Environment, Peace and Security Multiplies Impact

As political support for mediation and development assistance comes under pressure, climate and environmental shocks are intensifying competition over resources and undermining the relationships dialogue depends on. Drawing on four years of implementation across Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen and the Bay of Bengal, this paper from the Weathering Risk Peace Pillar, a consortium of adelphi research, the Berghof Foundation, the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue and the European Institute of Peace, sets out what integrated climate, environment, peace and security (CEPS) programming can deliver and how it can be achieved in practice. The paper covers:

• The Integration Dividend, outlining five mutually reinforcing dividends of integrated programming: analytical, peace and security, environmental and climate, sustainability, and strategic and financial.
• Outcomes across the consortium, covering the shift from siloed analysis to an integrated understanding of CEPS interlinkages, evidence that integration multiplies rather than simply adds impact, mechanisms built to sustain dialogue and resource management beyond individual project cycles, and monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) approaches that sharpened practice and generated evidence for the wider field.
• How integration is achieved in practice, covering programme design choices such as pairing dialogue with practical environmental collaboration, designing mediation around environmental and institutional conditions, building implementation as a continuation of negotiation, and integrating storytelling into MEL, alongside "notes from the field" on the associated risks and trade-offs of each choice.
• The institutional conditions that make integration work, setting out what project teams need (time, flexible budgets, tailored MEL), what funders can do (multi-year and quality funding, investment in institutional CEPS capacity), and what national policymakers can do (policy coherence, embedding dialogue outcomes in regional institutions).
• Adaptive management in practice, illustrating how political change, climatic events, security deterioration, dialogue breakdowns and emerging opportunities triggered adaptation across the five projects.
• The frontier ahead, with forward-looking recommendations on mainstreaming integrated CEPS approaches into policy and programming, scaling proven approaches through partnerships, capitalising on longer-term environmental benefits, and extending the approach to new geographies and thematic challenges.