About Nature Footprints
Nature Footprints is a global grassroots project showcasing the impact of environmental and climate change on communities and conflict around the world.
Using art as a platform for reflection, testimony, and conversation, “طبعة الطبيعة | Nature Footprints” is a multilingual, multimedia, online ‘storybook’. The initiative is also hosting an in-person art exhibition in the Blue Zone of COP28.
Learn more about the project below, and ‘read’ our artistic storybook here. For further information, including requests to show or support the physical collection, please contact Annika Erickson-Pearson via art@naturefootprints.org.
About the Storybook: Art for Peace
Using art as a platform for reflection, testimony, and conversation, “طبعة الطبيعة | Nature Footprints” is a multimedia ‘storybook’. The primary focus of each piece is on human connection – to each other and to our Living Planet. The collection will be shown in the Blue Zone of COP28 in Dubai, emphasizing the critical need to put issues of peace and conflict in the spotlight during climate change negotiations. After COP28, we plan for the physical collection to travel globally, engaging diverse audiences in conversation about critical global issues. The accompanying virtual gallery will remain online indefinitely, featuring a wider array of art and providing accessibility to diverse audiences, inviting everyone to participate in the conversation.
Nature Footprints builds a bridge between the worlds of policy, art, and outcomes. By creating an entrypoint for understanding why it matters that we understand, talk about, and act on the interlinkages between climate, conflict, and peace, the project amplifies the voices of communities directly affected by climate-related conflict and/or participating in environmental peacebuilding efforts. Too often, those most impacted are not fully considered in decision-making spaces, and those with solutions are not given space to share their experiences. This storybook is intended as a way for COP28 attendees and policymakers to meaningfully connect with communities, using art as a ‘lingua franca’ that can speak across cultures, sectors, languages, and approaches.
The project builds on a few core assertions:
1. that individuals who make decisions about conflict and climate need to be aware of communities’ lived realities;
2. that people who have experienced climate conflict and/or participated in environmental peacebuilding have powerful stories to tell;
3. that we as a global community can learn both from examples of prior mistakes and from demonstrations of best practice; and
4. that art is an especially effective way to share ideas and information.
About the Name: طبعة الطبيعة
طبعة الطبيعة (pronounced “tabeat altabiea”) literally translates to “The Nature Edition” in Arabic, and can also refer to “the impact or footprint of nature”. The Arabic name honors our host region for COP28, but also carries a significance for the project.
In Arabic language and culture, tabiaa (طبيعة, nature), is intimately connected both to the human condition and to storytelling.
Words in the Arabic language each have a root: a three- or four-consonant baseword representing the core meaning. Tabae (طبع) is the root word for nature. The same base is used to refer to a person’s fundamental character and to various aspects of print publishing. All of these are relevant to the “Nature Footprints project.
Our natural world can be beautiful, awe-inspiring, and harmonious. It can also be violent, aggressive, and terrifying. So too can people, and the way we choose to share information. The Nature Footprint initiative is about acknowledging the harm that our natural environment can do to us, and we to it, while showcasing the positive impact we can make by protecting nature and building peace with each other.
Partners and Supporters
The Nature Footprints storybook project is an ongoing partnership between multiple actors working at the intersections of the environment, climate, conflict, and peace. Coordinated by community organisers based at the Environmental Peacebuilding Association and the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform, the initial collection and physical exhibition at COP28 were made possible with generous support from the PeaceNexus Foundation, the Environment of Peace project of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the World Bank Group, the Berghof Foundation, the Madarat Cultural Organization, and the War Prevention Initiative of the Jubitz Family Foundation. Their financial backing ensured that the Nature Footprints artists and interns were fairly compensated for their work creating the storybook’s initial chapters.
Members of the curatorial team include Annika Erickson-Pearson (Project Manager), Becca Farnum (Team Manager), and Lynn Finnegan (Artistic Manager) along with Mohammed Bawazir (Regional Liaison), Montreal Benesch (Artist Liaison), Shaima Bin Othman (Regional Liaison), Carrie Hanks (Communications Liaison), Ryan Maia (Communications Lead), Marwa Mohabe (Communications Liaison), Max Ourada (Communications Designer), and Guillermina Pelaez (Artist Liaison).
The curatorial team were supported by a Steering Committee whose membership included Shaadee Jasmine Ahmadnia, Claudia Zoe Bedrick, Kelsey Coolidge, Andrea Gadnert, Hesta Groenewald, Tracy Hart, Héloïse Heyer, Helena de Jong, Claire McAllister, Paloma Noriega, and Phoebe Spencer.
Linguistic diversity and inclusion throughout the project, and in its publications, was made possible thanks to Maria del Mar Aponte Rodriguez, Hamza Arsbi, Mohammed Bawazir, Camille Ben, Montreal Benesch, Shaima Bin Othman, Emmanuel Davalillo Hidalgo, Filippo de Gennaro, Claire Doyle, Rhiana Fullan, Gabriel Gomes Couto, Guillermina Pelaez, and Irina Sorokina.
You can learn more about the team behind “Nature Footprints” here.
Project Background
Nature Footprints is a collaboration between the Environmental Peacebuilding Association, the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform-led Community of Practice on Environment, Climate, Conflict, and Peace (ECCP), and their #PeaceAtCOP28 community.
The Environmental Peacebuilding Association (EnPAx) is a global organisation bringing together researchers, practitioners, and decision makers working on issues of environment, conflict, and peace. The Association identifies promising research avenues and best policy practices, and fosters the exchange of knowledge and data. EnPAx further works to build capacity among practitioners to advance the field, and to increase impact by connecting scholars, practitioners, decision makers, and others across disciplines, genders, geographical locations, and stages of professional development.
For the past several years, EnPAx has worked closely with the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform-led Community of Practice on Environment, Climate, Conflict, and Peace (ECCP) – an expansive and international community of practice. With more than 800 participants, the ECCP community fosters inter-institutional collaboration and dialogue, promotes shared learning and innovation, and mainstreams these topics across the board between the environment, climate, conservation, conflict, security, and peace sectors. Participants come from different backgrounds in each of the fields, ranging from policy-making to research to practice and community-led programs.
In the past, EnPAx and ECCP have collaborated on shared projects and conferences, including an illustrated White Paper on the Future of Environmental Peacebuilding, which seeded a successful multi stakeholder effort to mainstream peace and conflict-sensitivity at Stockholm+50. Such multi stakeholder, concrete projects towards specific policy-points provide essential vehicles for communication across differences, reconciliation of varied priorities, and institutional incentives for collaboration.
The core idea behind the work of EnPAx and ECCP is that peace and conflict sensitivity are inextricably linked to environmental policy. We cannot sustain a healthy planet or achieve prosperity for all without inclusive and just peace, recognising that inequitable natural resource management and environmental damage can fuel conflict and division. Environmental policy should be aware of how it interacts with local contexts and potential contributions to – or causes of – violence, seeking to be conflict sensitive and to purposefully promote equitable collaboration on natural resource and environment issues.
Building on our conversations at global events such as Stockholm+50 and international academic conferences, community members have initiated a joint collaboration to raise awareness about peace and conflict sensitivity at COP28, to be hosted in December 2023 by the United Arab Emirates. There are currently more than 100 individuals across 50 institutions meeting biweekly to coordinate policy priorities, activities, events, and communications for the conference. The immediate goal is to enable decision makers, civil society leaders, and community members at COP28 to better integrate concerns about conflict into their work, with the broader aim of building positive peace in partnership with our global ecosystem.
Art plays an essential role in developing ideas, promoting empathy, and raising awareness. In diverse cultures around the world, mediums such as dance, song, poetry, and visual art hold a special power for reproducing – and altering – social structures and lived experiences. As former American President Barack Obama said, the arts have helped us “grapple with the most challenging questions and come to know the most basic truths”.
In particular, the cultural sector holds a special power for community building and diplomacy. The arts convey stories, build relationships, and connect people to ideas in a particularly effective and evocative way. As such, EnPAx and ECCP have been working on a quickly growing arts initiative, collaborating with artists to disseminate information and inviting communities to share their experiences through creative mediums as well as more traditional forms of research and policy knowledge. The white paper project on “Nurturing an Ecosystem for Peace” invited nine illustrators to bring the case studies and recommendations to life. The work of our contracted artists – both in process and tangible output – not only elevated the project itself, but created space for people outside of the environmental peacebuilding field to come closer, make meaning without words, and form an attachment to the themes. At Stockholm+50, event attendees were invited to contribute to a collaborative art project reflecting on the intersections between conflict, cooperation, and the environment; one attendee shared that “art is all about picking up the pieces…and showcasing, amidst brokenness, where peace is”.
