Natural resources and peacebuilding – is the United Nations united?

There is a fundamental need to address natural resource degradation, governance and benefit-sharing as a fundamental component of peacebuilding in Afghanistan and other post-war countries.

David Jensen heads the Environmental Cooperation for Peacebuilding programme of the UN Environment Programme. His portfolio of work focuses on how natural resources contribute to conflict, as well as how they can be managed in ways that create jobs, sustain livelihoods, and contribute to economic recovery and peacebuilding, without creating new grievances or significant environmental degradation. He has worked on 15 post-conflict operations from Afghanistan and Iraq to Sierra Leone and more recently in Cote d’Ivoire. In addition to field work, he also focuses on integrating natural resource risks and opportunities across UN policies on conflict prevention, peacekeeping and peacebuilding. He is currently co-managing a new series of six flagship books on natural resources and peacebuilding involving over 230 contributors capturing lessons learned from over 50 different post-conflict countries. He is also the co-editor of one of the books within the series entitled “Assessing and Restoring Natural Resources in Post-Conflict Peacebuilding” published on 6 November 2012. He holds a bachelor’s degree in geography and political science from the University of Victoria and a master’s degree in biology from the University of Oxford.

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