Environment, war and peace: what challenges for water governance?

As part of the Interfaculty Seminar on the Environment organized by the University of Lausanne (UNIL), a series of conferences brings together researchers, practitioners and students around the theme "The environment between war and peace". This cycle explores how environmental dynamics – natural resources, ecosystems, infrastructures or territories can both fuel tensions and constitute levers for cooperation and reconstruction.

Through interdisciplinary approaches combining law, environmental sciences, geography and social sciences, the seminar examines in particular how conflicts affect natural resources, how these can become strategic or humanitarian issues, and how their governance can contribute to crisis prevention and peacebuilding.

On 24 March, Mara Tignino, Scientific Director of the Geneva Water Hub and Senior Lecturer at the University of Geneva, will intervene in this context to bring a perspective centered on water and international law. His intervention will analyze the legal and institutional challenges related to water protection in a conflict context, as well as the role that international standards and cooperation around water resources can play to promote stability, the protection of civilian populations and infrastructure, and sustainable water governance.

This meeting is part of a broader reflection on how natural resources – and in particular water – can become both a factor of vulnerability in crises and a vector for dialogue and peace in contemporary international relations.