Amanda Kron
Legal Advisor, Crisis Management Branch
United Nations Environment Programme
Switzerland
May 7, 2019
Amanda Kron is a lawyer and practitioner focusing on climate change, security, and legal protections for the environment. She serves as both the legal advisor for the Crisis Management Branch of UN Environment and as the project coordinator for Climate Change and Security, a partnership between the European Union and UN Environment. She earned an LLM at Uppsala University in Sweden, where she developed an interest in integrated approaches to environmental issues. Amanda has also worked as the Programme Coordinator on Human Rights for the Centre for International Sustainable Development Law and as a Research Assistant with the International Law Commission.
In her dual roles as legal advisor and project coordinator, Amanda has seen the ways in which both legal and community-oriented approaches can support climate adaptation, climate-sensitive livelihoods, and just governance of resources in conflict and post-conflict settings. She has worked on protection of the environment in relation to armed conflicts, both supporting the International Law Commission and in her current position as legal advisor for the Crisis Management Branch of UN Environment. She has supported the development of materials and draft principles on the protection of the environment in relation to armed conflicts. This work links with efforts by others working on increasing access to information, protecting ecologically and culturally important areas from the impacts of armed conflict, and conducting post-conflict environmental assessments.
In her role as project coordinator, Amanda has examined how climate change interacts with security and how climate change adaptation and peacebuilding can be integrated for better resilience and sustainable peace. Her work has focused particularly on how the policy consensus around these issues can be translated into integrated assessment tools, and specifically ways to address climate-fragility risks on the ground. The Climate Change and Security project has focused on actions in North Darfur in Sudan and the far western region in Nepal, particularly working on ensuring inclusive and participatory relationships around climate-fragility measures. This work has emphasized three key elements: strengthening relationships around climate-sensitive natural resource management between communities and between communities and local governments, supporting climate-sensitive livelihoods for vulnerable groups with attention paid to local contexts, and ensuring both inclusive governance of natural resources and just implementation of existing policies.
Amanda emphasizes the importance of access to information in both the legal and climate change aspects of her work. She explains, “Access to trusted information on climate change and natural resources can serve as a platform for peaceful dialogue between divided communities. Having access to good baseline data and strengthening inclusive monitoring and evaluation of climate-fragility risks is key to ensure that the climate change and security community of practice can effectively measure and better understand impacts of actions to address climate-fragility risks, particularly at local level.”
When it comes to environmental peacebuilding, Amanda remarks on the innovative dynamic of approaching environmental issues and striving for peace in an integrated manner. She sees the continued learning opportunities in an interdisciplinary approach as useful, noting, “Translating and sharing concepts across different disciplines can make integrated and combined approaches more resilient. This approach is especially useful for achieving objectives like the Sustainable Development Goals that require an integrated approach.” Amanda sees value in the Environmental Peacebuilding Association as a diverse community of practice to work across approaches and disciplines, and a means for keeping people updated on events and projects going on in different parts of the world.