Olivia
Lazard
The European Union stands at a critical juncture aiming to externalise its Green Deal in a complex geopolitical environment. The Green Deal is the most advanced political and technical proposition to chart forward a regional climate transition. For all its worth, it is still currently inadequate to face the extensive ecological breakdowns undermining international security as well as the European project itself. The EU needs to develop a full-fledge ecological diplomacy approach at the heart of its foreign policy. In her research, Olivia Lazard focuses on a specific case study to illustrate what a context-specific ecological approach can look like.
Olivia Lazard is a fellow at Carnegie Europe. Her research focuses on the geopolitics of climate, the transition ushered by climate change, and the risks of conflict and fragility associated with climate change and environmental collapse. She is an environmental peacemaking and mediation practitioner as well as a researcher with over 12 years of experience in the peacemaking sector. With a specialization in the political economy of conflicts, she has worked for various nongovernmental organizations, the UN, the EU, and donor states in the Middle East, Latin America, Sub-Saharan and North Africa, and parts of Asia. Her focus was to understand how globalization and the international political economy shaped patterns of violence and vulnerability patterns as well as formed new types of conflict systems that the international governance architecture has difficulty tackling. Through fieldwork, she observed the ways in which the plundering of ecosystems feeds conflict systems across the world and contributes to climate disruptions. Her research has led to supporting the European External Action Service in integrating environmental peacemaking in its mediation toolkit.
