By Camilla Born
Hot on the heels of this week’s Planetary Security Conference the UN Security Council will today discuss the steps that could be taken to address climate-related security risks by the UN system. As the risks become more material, the message of this week’s Hague Declaration becomes even more pressing - we must move from ‘analysis to action’
Denying security impacts emanating from climate change has now become very difficult, if not impossible. The Hurricane season in the Caribbean and floods in South-East Asia were merely examples of the devastating impacts. And elsewhere, climate change is creating loss of livelihood and in its slipstream political unrest and terrorist recruitment. Grounded in these harsh climate realities, the pressure is mounting on the Secretary General and major powers like China, Russia and European countries.
Today’s Security Council meeting is co-hosted by a range of countries from across the world: Italy, Sweden, Morocco, the UK, the Netherlands, Peru, Japan, France, the Maldives and Germany. All are coming together to initiate a discussion on ‘Preparing for the security implications of rising temperatures'.
Breaking from Security Council tradition, the discussion aims to move beyond awareness raising and instead facilitate a practical debate about the tools the UN requires to address the peace and security implications of climate change. Consistent with The Hague Declaration, the meeting will in particularly discuss the merits of the growing call to create an institutional home for climate-related security risks in the UN system.
The proposal to create an institutional home for climate-related security risks was first proposed by Sweden and builds upon the long-held call from Small Island States and other climate-vulnerable countries for a high-level representative for Climate Security. The German and Dutch governments have also been active in supporting the call for the institutional home and many are identifying the Secretary General’s September 2019 climate summit as an important landing point.
In the previous decade, the UN Security Council largely discussed climate change as an awareness raising exercise acknowledging it as "threat multiplier". However, this year the Council passed the first resolution recognising climate-related security risks and the need to respond to them.
Today’s meeting will pick up where March’s resolution on 'Peace and Security in Africa' left off. The resolution recognises the need for climate risk assessments and risk management strategies to form part of necessary responses to manage security risks. However, there has been no way to come good on this task because there is currently no institutional home in the UN system tasked with this job.
Today’s next step is logically to discuss how to create the practical tools for responding to climate-related security risks. Amidst the tussle of politics and worsening climate realities, countries are expressing a growing interest in creating an institutional home for the management of climate-related security risks. This would entail a mechanism to coordinate and catalyse responses on the climate-security interface between various UN agencies, programmes and other stakeholders. That would truly enable the UN to go from analysis to action on climate and security.
Camilla Born is Senior Policy Advisor E3G and works with SIPRI on the climate-security interface in the UNSC.