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The pursuit of sustainable development in the context of global environmental change requires enhanced capability to deal with changing hazard profiles, across scales and geographies. Humans attempt to manage human and natural systems interactions in ways that minimize disaster risks, and the political expression of this ambition is the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 (‘Sendai Framework’). These efforts lay the foundation for sustainable development, as since the onset of the Sendai Framework, the policy objective of disaster risk reduction has been explicitly linked to global progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. Separately, peace is a focal point of SDG 16, and widely regarded as foundational to attainment of all SDGs. Meanwhile in academic and policy arenas throughout the 2000s, evidence attests of the amplifying negative impact of climate-related disaster events on increasing violent conflict. What remains underexplored are questions of whether and how effective management of human and natural systems interaction, through disaster risk reduction, can contribute towards conditions of peace through peacebuilding. This paper explores how delivery of the Sendai Framework is necessary for sustainability, and potentially also for peace. In the context of the sustainability–peace nexus, the contribution of disaster risk reduction is terra incognita. This paper aims to deepen understanding of those under-researched tripartite links.

Since climate change was included on the United Nations Security Council's agenda in 2007, there has been much debate about whether or not it has been securitised. This paper starts from the premise that climate change has undergone a partial securitisation-that is, a gradual process wherein political choices are made to frame certain issues in particular ways. Climate change has been reframed from a purely developmental and environmental concern to one that impels foreign policy and security domains. This paper makes a novel contribution to disasters, climate change, and security studies by arguing that explicit and implicit links to natural hazard-related disasters have been employed as part of a gradual process of securitisation, or, more specifically, the partial securitisation of climate change. This is demonstrated by drawing on two cases: United Nations Security Council debates between 2007 and 2017; and the United Kingdom's security policy between 1997 and 2017.

The interlinkages between peace and sustainability are embedded in several international agreements and declarations and recognized by various research studies. However, the characteristics of their bidirectional relationship remain underexamined. Here we scope the complex and multifaceted relationship between peace and sustainability based on an experts workshop held at Hiroshima University in August 2019. The workshop focused on how peace, as a process or a condition, can help or hinder sustainability and vice versa. Relevant environmental, socio-political, and economic and technological considerations highlighted at the workshop were integrated into a co-designed heuristic guide for investigating the peace-sustainability nexus in the context of global change. The proposed guide aims to assist academic and policy researchers in identifying the specific pathways through which peace and sustainability interact when addressing complex challenges. The reinforcing potential of the two will ultimately depend on the governance and management of global transformations.