Why Peacebuilding Needs Climate Thinking and Climate Action Needs Memory, Place, and Justice
- Frazer Macdonald Hay
- Dec 5, 2025
- 5 min read
By Frazer Macdonald Hay
Across the UN and global policy landscape, the term “climate–conflict nexus” has become shorthand for the reality that environmental shocks and social instability are increasingly inseparable. But the nexus is often described in economic or technological terms, food security, water scarcity, critical infrastructure, adaptation finance, and “smart” responses.
Yet missing from most of these discussions is something fundamentally human:How people inhabit place, remember trauma, negotiate belonging, and make meaning from their built environments.
This neglected dimension, the architecture of memory and everyday life, is precisely where peace and climate imperatives meet.
And this is where our work sits.
The Built Environment as the Meeting Point of Peace and Climate
In fragile and conflict-affected states, the urban fabric is more than infrastructure:It is the lived repository of identity, history, culture, legitimacy and trust.
Public toilets, alleyways, post-war apartment blocks, corner shops, mosques, bunkered squares, abandoned churches, what I call the “junk DNA” of cities, hold memories people struggle to articulate.
Climate disruption doesn’t simply damage structures.It disrupts continuity, and continuity is peacebuilding.
Destroy the fabric of everyday life, and you destabilise the fragile binding material that helps communities rebuild trust after violence.
That is why climate adaptation, when done carelessly, can reproduce conflict.
Adaptive Reuse as Climate Strategy and Peacebuilding Practice
Across Iraq, Syria, Northern Ireland, and Mexico, my work has focused on the adaptive re-use of existing buildings, a methodology that starts by recognising the emotional, symbolic and cultural meaning embedded in structures.
Adaptive reuse is often seen as a cultural or economic practice.But it is also:
Low-carbon (the least carbon is the carbon we don’t emit)
Trauma-sensitive (it preserves continuity and meaning)
Displacement-mitigating (it anchors belonging in place)
Cohesion-building (it invites participation and shared ownership)
In other words, it is a peace dividend and a climate strategy simultaneously.
Climate Stress Activates Old Wounds Unless Memory is Addressed
Climate disruption in post-conflict cities does not act on a blank slate.
Poorly handled adaptation can reawaken unresolved grievances:
Who gets protected neighbourhoods and who doesn’t?
Where do displaced families return to ( or not)?
Which heritage is saved, which is erased?
Who decides and who feels excluded from decisions?
These dynamics are not environmental; they are political, psychological and spatial.
A trauma-informed approach ensures that adaptation strengthens, rather than fractures, fragile civic trust.
Mexico: Seeing Climate, Urbanisation, and Trust Together
In Mexico City and Mérida, climate vulnerability and urban inequality collide sharply.
My work there showed that climate risk is not “natural”; it is socio-spatially produced.Informal settlements, under-resourced districts, and neglected infrastructure suffer the gravest impacts.
Technocratic “smart city” solutions often attempt to fix risk from above, using data systems, sensors, and urban modelling. These tools have value, but only when they are grounded in legitimacy.
And legitimacy is generated through participation, trust and social meaning, not technology.
The Smart City Promise — and Its Trust Problem
One of the clearest insights from this research is that smart city promises create scepticism, even fear, in communities already distrustful of authority.
This mistrust reflects the lived experience of:
institutions that have failed them before
top-down planning that displaced them
government agendas that privilege some and neglect others
opaque decision-making without community voice
In such contexts, technological intervention can look like surveillance, not resilience.
Smartness without trust is fragility disguised as innovation.
Climate risk governance collapses if the communities most affected do not trust the institutions managing it.
Smart Resilience Requires Co-Production, Not Technocratic Imposition
From the literature and casework in Mexico, the conclusion is clear:
Resilience cannot be delivered to people; it must be built with them.
Smart city approaches can support resilience, but only when:
participation is genuine
decisions are co-produced
Community knowledge is valued
cultural memory and identity are recognised
Socio-spatial inequalities are confronted, not ignored
Data can inform strategy, but data does not replace legitimacy.And legitimacy is the true infrastructure of resilience.
This is a peacebuilding principle — applied to climate governance.
Positive Smart City Examples Around the World
While critique is important, there are successful examples of smart city approaches that genuinely benefit vulnerable communities:
1. Sponge City Program, Guangzhou: ChinaGuangzhou uses a “sponge city” approach to manage pluvial flooding while integrating green infrastructure into urban expansion. Through bio-swales, rain gardens, permeable pavements, and interconnected rivers, the city absorbs stormwater, reduces peak discharges, and improves public amenity. Real-time traffic and environmental monitoring, powered by the Tianhe-2 supercomputer, enables both hazard mitigation and enhanced quality of life (Meng et al., 2018; Chan, 2018).
2. Smart Communities: JapanJapanese “smart communities” integrate energy and digital technologies into citizen life to improve resilience and reduce consumption. Unlike technocratic models, these initiatives focus on co-producing public services with residents, creating governance systems where community participation is central to planning, monitoring, and behaviour change (Granier & Kudo, 2016; METI, 2014).
3. Chesterfield Heights Project: Norfolk, USAIn Norfolk, flood-prone neighbourhoods received smart city interventions including ultrasonic and radar water sensors, IoT-enabled inundation forecasting, and underground cisterns to capture stormwater. Co-designed with residents, local NGOs, and universities, the project balances technology with community engagement to improve resilience and ensure equitable benefits (Loftis et al., 2018).
4. Rio de Janeiro: BrazilRio employs data-driven applications to forecast natural disasters, coordinate infrastructure responses, and manage policing. Crucially, it has developed co-collaboration models that integrate civil society, city authorities, and private partners to respond to climate risks and social challenges, contrasting with purely top-down smart city examples like Masdar or Songdo (Sennett, 2012).
These cases show that technology can enhance resilience, but only when integrated with trust, participation, and co-production.
Mini-Case Examples: Mexico City, Lessons for Smart City Design
Based on my research in Mexico City, here are three examples illustrating how smart city interventions could succeed or fail in vulnerable urban communities:
1. Informal Settlement Flood Alerts: A municipal flood alert system relies on sensors and mobile notifications in an informal settlement. Residents lack formal land tenure and suspect the system could justify evictions. If implemented without co-production, alerts may be ignored, undermining both safety and trust.Opportunity: Co-design alert locations, ownership of data, and response protocols with the community.
2. Heritage Neighbourhood Water Management: A historic district faces seasonal flooding. A smart water monitoring system is installed, but residents fear surveillance and disruption to cultural heritage.Opportunity: Engage local heritage groups, ensure system visibility and transparency, and link technology to protecting identity and continuity.
3. Multi-Community Storm-water Planning: Several low-income neighbourhoods are targeted with “smart drainage” solutions. Tensions arise over perceived inequities in infrastructure investment and data interpretation.Opportunity: Create joint monitoring committees, ensure participatory planning across communities, and provide equitable benefits.
Lesson: Co-production, legitimacy, and recognition of local knowledge are as important as sensors and algorithms in ensuring effective, conflict-sensitive climate adaptation.
Housing, Land and Property as the Peace–Climate Frontier
When climate displacement accelerates, it will test:
property rights
tenure ambiguity
contested returns
heritage and belonging
institutional legitimacy
I have worked on these issues in post-conflict Iraq, but the lessons are universal.
HLP is not peripheral to climate stress; it is where adaptation becomes political, emotional, and historical.
Peacebuilders know this.Climate planners must learn it.
Why Memory Matters to Climate Governance
Climate adaptation is not simply about infrastructure or engineering.It is about:
meaning and identity
trust and legitimacy
continuity and belonging
shared narratives of the future
These are the deep elements of peace.And they are also the deep elements of resilience.
The Bottom Line
Peacebuilding without climate awareness is incomplete.Climate adaptation without peacebuilding insight is brittle.
Architecture, and specifically adaptive reuse, sits where the two meet.It anchors identity, preserves memory, reduces displacement pressure, and enables social cohesion.
For too long, adaptation has been treated as an engineering problem.It is, in fact, a cultural, spatial and political one.
The future of the climate–conflict nexus will depend on how well we engage with the everyday places where identity meets infrastructure, and where meaning meets governance.
That is the space where we work.
Frazer :)
