Uganda's refugee policy is widely regarded for promoting agricultural self-reliance among the country's nearly 2 million refugees, the largest in Africa. However, viability of this model is often challenged by how hydroclimatic shocks interact with household capacity to absorb them, an interaction that remain poorly understood. Here, we address a key gap by explicitly distinguishing unimodal and bimodal rainfall regimes and linking regime-specific drought and wetness dynamics to refugee livelihood exposure and household land access. We analyse 6-month Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (1981-2024) and Vegetation Condition Index (2001-2024) anomalies, focusing on May-October main growing and harvest season. We find that the interannual extremes are highly episodic and often asynchronous between rainfall regimes. Only 2009, 2016, and 2023 exhibit widespread drought in both regimes, whereas only 2011 and 2012 are widely wet in both. Many large events are regimespecific, producing spatially uneven exposure, and long-term trends in affected area are weak relative to yearto-year variability. Major droughts are characterized by a late-season moisture deficit compounded by elevated atmospheric demand, with vegetation responses that are broadly consistent but spatially heterogeneous. We further show that hydroclimatic shocks intersect with rapidly rising refugee exposure in a small set of districts and with large structural constraints on land access and food-related outcomes. Notably, refugees typically hold one-eighth of the mean arable land as host households, a structural deficit suggesting that climate shocks rapidly and unevenly translate into production shortfalls rising market and aid dependence. These findings underscore the fragility of the self-reliance model under spatially uneven, episodic drought conditions. Sustaining refugee self-reliance will not only require spatially explicit climate monitoring but also need structural interventions in refugee-hosting regions where climatic, demographic, and land access pressures converge.

Despite the entanglements between people and their environments in contexts of war and the aftermath, how people negotiate everyday life during peace transitions in changing environments remains largely unexplored in scholarship. This article examines the environmental dimensions of everyday peace—the mundane interactions and practices through which individuals navigate and cope with conflict and engage in care during transitions out of war—to better understand peace and sustainability in lived realities. The study presents the findings from a systematic literature review of 72 academic articles in the everyday peace literature. The majority of these publications featured little to no reference to people’s natural or built environments. This study subsequently conducted a thematic analysis of the 31 articles coded for environmental content to identify four emergent themes as a starting point to interrogate how environments shape and are shaped by everyday peace. The discussion makes two key arguments. First, environments are not passive backdrops, but they enable and constrain what people do and how they interact. Second, environmental change, degradation, and loss coevolve with changing human experiences, actions, and meaning (re)making. These intertwined relationships underscore that the dynamic material and affective qualities of everyday environments where people live, work, and spend their time are relevant to the study of social micro-interactions constituting survival and coexistence. This research opens new avenues for understanding and supporting relational recoveries from the human and environmental wounds of war, while also laying the groundwork for shared futures that depend on biosocial healing.

There have long been global calls to strengthen community-led and -engaged approaches in public health, but most community health interventions are still driven by governments and other external actors to reduce narrow measures of disease burden. Despite theoretical advancements in salutogenesis and positive health, these concepts remain underapplied in understanding and supporting collective health and wellbeing at the community level. This empirical qualitative study aimed to refine the concept of "community positive health" by grounding it in community perspectives and identifying the factors that shape local health and wellbeing. This participatory research engaged community health leaders and residents in marginalized communities in Kenya in expert interviews, community focus group discussions, and co-analysis in three iterative qualitative phases from 2021 to 2022. Thematic analysis guided the synthesis of community-derived insights into a definition of community positive health as a community-led salutogenic process supported by networked capabilities to provide mutual care and thrive as communities encounter changes and challenges for their health and wellbeing. Five interconnected dimensions at the intersection of resources and risk factors were identified: meeting basic needs, people-centered care, sustainable resource management, informed decision-making, and self-governance. Strengthening community positive health requires a dual focus on resources and risk factors, and, most importantly, how networked "communities of health" can be supported by formal community health structures. This approach offers a path toward reimagining health not just for communities but also with them.

The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the unpreparedness of global and public health systems to respond to large-scale health crises, while simultaneously revealing the entangled nature of disinformation and poor global and public health outcomes. This research challenges the common treatment of public health disinformation - deliberately false information - as an emergent and technical threat, and instead situates it as a more systemic and nuanced challenge for global health governance to address. This article presents an integrative narrative literature review on the interlinkages between public health disinformation, conflict, and disease outbreaks, demonstrating mutually influencing connections between them. In doing so, the analysis raises critical questions around how reactive responses, such as doubling down on information authority, can paradoxically fuel the uptake of both disinformation especially amidst global trends towards increasing conflict and decreasing cooperation. In this evolving sociopolitical landscape for global health, the discussion explores the potential to harness health diplomacy to strengthen critical public engagement and deliberation. This reimagined approach to health diplomacy offers pathways to mitigate the harmful effects of disinformation rather than seeking to eliminate false information. This article contributes to deepening an understanding of this rapidly expanding topic for global and public health in two pathways. First, by investigating the root causes and impacts of public health disinformation that intersect with conflict. Second, by exploring how health diplomacy can foster cooperative global health governance through transparency and inclusion. This research offers a new direction to strengthen preparedness for future global and public health crises amidst disinformation.

Environmental cooperation is theorized to contribute to peacebuilding, but the complexity of how this linkage is realized for the people involved remains out of view. This article applies relational thinking—understanding individuals, systems, and concepts through their interconnectedness and mutual influence—to the field of environmental peacebuilding with the goal of contributing to theory building. This research focuses on nearly 30 years of EcoPeace Middle East’s environmental peacebuilding over shared waters in Israel, Jordan, and Palestine from 1994 to 2022. Based on interviews with 83 people involved in environmental peacebuilding programming, the analysis outlines the plurality of how participants perceive and practice their changing roles, responsibilities, and agency in relation to themselves, each other, and their shared environments. The findings are interpreted in three analytical categories: stagnation, shifts, and transformations. This research suggests that pathways from environmental cooperation to peacebuilding may not be tied as strongly to outcomes but the process of how they engage deeper relational networks of heterogeneous meaning making. We argue that the many voices of environmental cooperation together contribute to ongoing and nonlinear processes of peace and environmental sustainability even amid ongoing violence.

Disasters disproportionately affect conflict-affected regions, where approximately two billion people reside, posing significant challenges for disaster risk reduction (DRR). This reality has increasingly spurred calls for violent conflict to be included in the global DRR agenda. However, consideration of peace has been lacking, despite that challenges for peace can distinctly impact capacities to set, pursue, and achieve DRR objectives. This study investigated how the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 (SFDRR) engages with peace through a document analysis, revealing three key findings. First, the SFDRR does not mention “peace,” mirroring its lack of reference to conflict. Second, while peace-related terms appear throughout the SFDRR in themes related to partnership and all-of-society approaches, this engagement is superficial. Third, the SFDRR’s approach is fundamentally problematic for advancing peace due to its avoidance of the complex social and political dynamics inherent to disaster risk and its reduction. The SFDRR united United Nations Member States in its ambition to “leave no one behind,” but has taken approaches that smooth over diversity rather than strengthen pluralistic connections. A radical, integrated DRR-peacebuilding agenda must take conflict as the new starting point and carve new pathways toward peace including through disaster diplomacy and environmental peacebuilding. By embracing the ambiguity between war and peace and addressing the root causes of risk, societies can cultivate peaceful interactions and collectively advance safety. This study concludes with recommendations for a global DRR policy that not only implicitly relies on peace but actively contributes to peacebuilding in the world’s diverse and divided societies.

Little is known on how community-based responses to planetary health crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can integrate concerns about livelihoods, equity, health, wellbeing, and the environment. We used a translocal learning approach to co-develop insights on community-based responses to complex health and environmental and economic crises with leaders from five organisations working with communities at the front line of intersecting planetary health challenges in Finland, India, Kenya, Peru, and the USA. Translocal learning supports collective knowledge production across different localities in ways that value local perspectives but transcend national boundaries. There were three main findings from the translocal learning process. First, thanks to their proximity to the communities they served, community-based organisations (CBOs) can quickly identify the ways in which COVID-19 might worsen existing social and health inequities. Second, localised CBO actions are key to supporting communities with unique challenges in the face of systemic planetary health crises. Third, CBOs can develop rights-based, ecologically-minded actions responding to local priorities and mobilising available resources. Our findings show how solutions to planetary health might come from small-scale community initiatives that are well connected within and across contexts. Locally-focused globally-aware actions should be harnessed through greater recognition, funding, and networking opportunities. Globally, planetary health initiatives should be supported by applying the principles of subsidiarity and translocalism.

Community groups are taking initiatives to adapt to a changing climate. These organizations differ from businesses and governments by being non-profit, often informal, resource limited, and reliant on volunteer labor. How these organizations facilitate collective action is not well known, especially since they do not necessarily solve common pool resource governance, but rather improve common pool resources through collective action. In fact, at first glance, community groups seem to not have the means for solving collective action problems used routinely in industry and government, such as paying people for cooperation or punishing them for lack of it.This article investigates how community groups solve collective action problems though data gathered across 25 organizations in three sites - Sitka, Alaska, USA; Toco, Trinidad; and a global site of distributed citizen science organizations. We found that community groups used positive reinforcement methods common to industry and used little punishment. Groups also engaged in mechanisms for collective action, such as relying on altruistic contributions by few individuals, that generally are not considered commonplace in businesses and governments. We conclude by discussing implications from this study for collective action theory and for how policymakers might learn from community groups to address climate change.

Environmental peacebuilding investigates mutually reinforcing relationships between environmental sustainability and peacebuilding. However, environmental peacebuilding research and practice frequently neglect to explicitly take account of power relations and inequities. This is despite other fields of research highlighting the centrality of power relations in the environment and in conflict. We reviewed the environmental peacebuilding literature for i) descriptions of contextual power dynamics and ii) explicit discussion of addressing power in environmental peacebuilding interventions. Just over half of included articles contained at least one of these, meaning that nearly half of articles did not discuss or engage with power or inequity in either the environmental/conflict context or the intervention process. Where articles did engage with power, there was a tendency to draw from narrow conceptualisations of power as control over others and over natural resources. We discuss these results in the context of broader debates around conceptualising power, and highlight the value of a relational approach to power for environmental peacebuilding. Finally, we propose a framework to recentre power in environmental peacebuilding interventions. We illustrate the ways that all interventions engage with power to some extent, regardless of whether they explicitly set out to do so. We argue that reaching the ‘virtuous cycle’ of mutually reinforcing positive peace and environmental sustainability requires active transformation of power relations.

Colombia's mental health services have a complex history shaped by 60 years of armed conflict, a predominantly clinical approach to mental health, and social factors such as inequities and stigma. The 1990 Caracas declaration proposed a shift towards decentralised community mental health services and interventions based on the recovery approach and emphasis on social determinants of mental health in the Americas. Colombia has adopted these approaches in its legal and practical framework in recent years, but implementation has been uneven. This systematic review aims to contribute to mental health services understanding in Colombia by examining the barriers and facilitators to the implementation of mental health services in Colombia. A search was conducted to explore available peer-reviewed studies on Colombian mental health services across five databases (Medline, PubMed, Scopus, Scielo and BVS) on quantitative and qualitative research papers published in the last ten years and without language restrictions. The Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) was used to structure the analysis and identify barriers and facilitators during the implementation of mental health services. We adapted the CFIR to attend to gender, race and age informed by the Socio-Political Economy of Global Mental Health framework, given the importance of these factors to the Colombian health landscape. Finally, narrative synthesis was used to summarise the data. 1 530 records were identified, and 12 articles met all inclusion criteria and were included in the analysis. 8 papers described substance use disorders services, 11 involved multidisciplinary healthcare professionals, and 7 were implemented at a local scale. The primary barriers to implementation were the lack of coordination, high workloads, and low funding. Facilitators included the use of protocols, and the involvement of communities, stakeholders, users, and external champions. Findings suggest the continued importance of community and recovery approaches and efforts to improve coordination between multi-sector actors involved in the mental health spaces (e.g., public, and private organisations, users and their families).

As climate change increasingly affects the world, much is said about the rising amounts of aid required to support emergency response, long-term development to adapt, and peacebuilding to ensure that conflict does not undermine these efforts. Bringing these ideas together, some advocate for the addition of a separate climate change stream into the humanitarian, development, and peace/peacebuilding nexus (or triple nexus). Based on a critical literature review and synthesis, this article articulates and conceptualizes how climate change perspectives and actions should be integrated into the existing streams of the humanitarian, development, and peace/peacebuilding nexus, rather than being added as a separate stream. The analysis shows the risks of adding climate change as a stand-alone stream and advocates for developing long-term strategies that integrate climate change actions into humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding efforts to better serve all three.

Belmont Forum by the UK Natural Environment Research Council.

Disasters, including disaster-related activities, have been shown to precipitate, intensify, and lengthen violent conflicts, yet disasters have also demonstrated the potential to reduce violent conflict, encourage cooperation, and build peace. Disaster-conflict and disaster-peace literature has sought to establish causal and linear relationships, but research has not explored with the same rigour the causal mechanisms linking these phenomena in long-term processes of social–political change and how they are influenced by human actions and inactions. This research fills this gap by drawing on in-depth interviews with disaster risk reduction (DRR) professionals in 25 disaster- and conflict-affected countries in South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa to analyse the pathways leading from disasters and disaster-related activities to violent conflict and peace. The findings highlight how these pathways can be deliberately swayed towards peace potential through DRR.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development recognized the interconnectedness of sustainable development, with peace and health emerging as highly influential. Challenges to peace and health have been linked from a systems approach by existing research; however, the potential for positive peace and positive health to be connected in a self-sustaining system has been investigated with less rigor. The present research argues that recentering a systems approach on capacities rather than challenges at the community level may present useful opportunities to both understand and pursue sustainability, which this paper explores through the lens of peace (SDG 16) and health (SDG 3).

Anticipatory disaster risk reduction (DRR) is an essential human right for the ~1 billion people living in informal settlements who are disproportionately exposed to climate-related hazards due to their high vulnerability. Participatory approaches are recognized as being critical for effective and sustainable disaster prevention, mitigation, and preparation through to response, but research on how to coproduce anticipatory DRR with people living and working in informal settlements is scant. Their exclusion is even more pronounced in challenging contexts, such as those characterized by social-political fragility and violence. As a result, a significant portion of the global population is left behind in best practices tied to global DRR ambitions, with DRR actions working neither with nor for the people most at risk. The signal case of urban informal settlements controlled by territorial gangs in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, illustrates the need for new thinking on how to inclusively mitigate, prepare for, and respond to natural hazard-related disasters. Our research examines the coproduction of early warning systems linked with response capacities for floods and landslides through the case study of the international NGO GOAL's work across the city with a focus on nine urban informal settlements with high levels of territorial gang violence. We explore how GOAL navigated informality and violent conflict to support the early warning and response system as an inclusive social process rather than a technical exercise. We identify four cross-cutting strategies employed by GOAL in support of local vulnerability reduction and capacity building based on a local systems approach. This research breaks new ground in identifying how to bridge the gap between knowledge and action in designing inclusive and sustainable early warning and response systems together with the millions of people around the world affected by the intersection of informality, violence, and disaster risks.

The field of community health promotion encompasses a wide range of approaches, including bottom-up approaches that recognise and build on the agency and strengths of communities to define and pursue their health goals. Momentum towards agent-based approaches to community health promotion has grown in recent years, and several related but distinct conceptual and methodological bodies of work have developed largely in isolation from each other. The lack of a cohesive collection of research, practice, and policy has made it difficult to learn from the innovations, best practices, and shortcomings of these approaches, which is exacerbated by the imprecise and inconsistent use of related terms. This article provides a review of three agent-based approaches to promoting community health: asset-based approaches, capacity building, and capabilities approaches, noting the theoretical origins and fundamental concepts, applications and methodologies, and limitations and critiques of each. This article discusses their commonalities and differences in terms of how they conceptualise and approach the promotion of community health, including a critical consideration of their limitations and where they may prove to be counterproductive. This article argues that agent-based approaches to community health must be met with meaningful opportunities to disengage from the structures that constrain their health.

As of this writing, there are 26 million refugees under UN mandate in 134 countries who have fled war and political persecution, with 10% living in UNHCR-managed refugee camps. The average stay in a refugee camp is more than 10 years, and more than two-thirds of refugees live in a "protracted refugee scenario," defined by the UNHCR as a situation in which "basic rights and essential economic, social, and psychological needs remain unfulfilled after years in exile." Such conditions can exacerbate the potential for social exclusion, economic isolation, and climate vulnerability across generations. Refugees need special assistance to adapt to climate change impacts, but they are consistently excluded from national disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation planning. Further, the encampment of refugees and asylum seekers restricts their ability to migrate within host countries and limits their agency to implement certain adaptation strategies including planned relocation. Despite the widespread recognition that climate change threatens the long-term viability of refugee camps, discussions of planned relocation and climate adaptation strategies are in their infancy. This chapter provides a framework to consider dimensions of social justice (including distributive, procedural, and restorative justice) in crafting a climate-induced relocation approach that promotes the agency, dignity, and security of refugees and host communities alike.