The environmental development support includes 14 Latin American projects, nine in Africa, three in Asia and 11 emergency relief programs. There are three environmentally focused programs Development and Peace classes as international.

“We are not supporting environmental projects just in the last few years because it’s become a trend,” said Development and Peace’s director of programs Gilio Brunelli. “But from the very beginning (in 1967) it was clear that people should have an environment, a place, where people are actually making a living which is safe, sound, respectful of life.”

The Development and Peace partners are generally focused on community building and defending the rights of the poor, rather than building infrastructure. It might be tempting to try to build waste treatment plants, irrigation systems, roads, etc. as a way of improving the environment in poor countries, but Development and Peace doesn’t have the financial muscle to either build or maintain large construction projects, said Brunelli.

{sidebar id=1}“We can’t build roads. We can’t build hospitals. We would rather spend that money on human capital than on physical capital,” Brunelli said. “Which is much more interesting to an organization like Development and Peace. It’s something which stays there forever.”

Development and Peace calls its support for environmentally focused non-governmental organizations and projects a “cross-cutting theme” of its work in poor countries south of the equator. There’s no separate category of funding for environmental projects, but it turns out a lot of good community economic development or democratization and civil society projects are also good for the environment.

In Nicaragua Development and Peace supports CAPRI, a rural non-governmental organization which focuses on women and children and has a history of trying to create a culture of reconciliation and peace in the still-divided communities of Nicaragua, where civil war raged through the 1980s. To help rural communities gain economic self-sufficiency, CAPRI (Centro de Apoyo a Programas y Proyectos) runs a seed recovery project which collects and distributes seeds to local farmers for traditional crops.

Traditional and sustainable farming methods help the environment and it preserves the culture and economic independence of Nicaragua’s rural communities, said Brunelli.

“It’s part of the traditional culture which doesn’t demand pesticides or other chemical components,” said Brunelli. “And that means they’re not depending on seeds from multinational companies.”

It’s hard to say where the environment falls among the development priorities of Development and Peace, Brunelli said. In countries mired in extreme conflict, such as Congo and Colombia, Development and Peace funding tends to go to organizations with a focus on reconciliation and post-conflict community building. But in the Philippines and parts of Latin America where mining is putting a lot of stress on communities by using large amounts of water and dumping tailings, Development and Peace partners find themselves more and more drawn into environmental campaigns.

“The environment is the space where people live,” said Brunelli. “We have an understanding of the environment in a broader sense — which is everything relating with people at the centre of the entire structure.”