The UN General Assembly in session. Credit: UN Photo

By Adam Day and Florian Krampe
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Jun 22 2023 (IPS)

The wildfires raging in Canada are yet another reminder that climate change is already having an impact on all our lives. As the smoke clears around the United Nations building in New York, we are likely to see a renewed push for the UN Security Council to tackle the security risks posed by climate change, including in the upcoming New Agenda for Peace policy brief from UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

Recent reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), supported by a growing body of scientific evidence, reach the inescapable conclusion that climate change is a meaningful factor in the risks of violent conflict.

In fact, one group of experts recently suggested that only a ‘misreading of the state of science’ could allow any doubt over the links between climate change and insecurity.

Despite the evidence, and despite the Security Council having already passed more than 70 resolutions and statements on climate-related security risks, efforts to make climate change a standing item on the Security Council’s agenda have so far failed.

While some permanent and elected members favour broadening the Security Council’s mandate to cover responses to all ‘threats to peace and security’, including climate change, others—notably China and Russia—want to keep Security Council business restricted to deploying peace operations, imposing sanctions, authorizing the use of military force and creating tribunals.

These mechanisms are not sufficient to address the plethora of climate-related security challenges societies around the world are facing.

The Security Council seems likely to continue its incremental approach, recognizing some country-specific climate–security links in resolutions (e.g. mentioning climate-driven recruitment into an armed group) without tackling the broader security impacts of the climate crisis.

Even this limited scope offers some real opportunities for addressing climate-related security issues in conflict settings that are already on the Security Council’s agenda. Nevertheless, it is time to ask whether more can be achieved within the UN system on broader climate–security challenges outside the Security Council chamber, in particular through the UN General Assembly.

There are many instances where the General Assembly has acted when the Security Council has become deadlocked. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 377—also known as the 1950 Uniting for Peace resolution—allows the General Assembly to call emergency sessions on threats to peace and security when this happens.

After laying unused for 25 years, the resolution was invoked in February 2022 in relation to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Furthermore, there is a surprisingly rich history of the General Assembly adopting a wide range of actions on security matters linked to human rights violations.

We here consider some of the arguments for the General Assembly taking a bigger role in addressing climate–security challenges.

A more inclusive forum

One of the objections to the Security Council’s role on climate–security (and indeed more generally) is that it is not an inclusive or meaningfully representative body. The 10 elected members have only two years to shape an issue, after which they rotate off the Council.

Thus, most of the time, the 188 UN member states, without the five permanent Security Council seats, have no say in the Council’s agenda. With every member state represented, the General Assembly is arguably a more representative forum for negotiating responses to a global issue such as climate change and its ensuing security risks.

Better access to the science

The scientific knowledge base on climate change and its impacts is developing fast. To design appropriate and timely multilateral responses, member states need regular access to the latest evidence, and this is another area in which the General Assembly’s offers important opportunities.

The Security Council could theoretically invite any scientist or expert to brief it on climate-related security risks, but in practice it has offered little access. The situation has improved significantly in the past five years thanks to the Climate Security Mechanism and the Informal Expert Group on Climate Security.

Also, efforts by the Peacebuilding Commission to broaden the climate–security discussion and introduce more evidence have only partially succeeded thus far.

The General Assembly has a more open and potentially dynamic set of processes for bringing in the latest climate and political science, and is able to consider evidence across the development, humanitarian and human rights arenas—where many of the human security impacts of climate change are most acutely felt.

In addition, its inclusive format means it can increase visibility of evidence coming from the most affected regions.

Generating new stimulus

Finally, the General Assembly can potentially galvanize a much broader range of integrated action across the UN system than can the Security Council. This is a distinct advantage, as the complex and dynamic ways in which climate-related security risks take shape mean that lasting solutions to them require coordinated responses across sectors.

In addition, engagement on climate-related security risks in the General Assembly could generate important new stimulus for the UN Climate Change Conferences as well as international financial institutions.

How could the General Assembly take up the climate–security challenge?

The General Assembly has plenty of shortcomings. On contentious issues, it tends to issue fairly toothless statements, and it has struggled to generate action on some of the most pressing issues of our time.

That said, a more concerted effort to activate the General Assembly on climate, peace and security could have a broader impact across the system, including potentially within the Security Council. As the General Assembly considers how to revitalize its work, we offer four possible entry points:

1. Put climate–security challenges on the agenda. It is worth noting that when Ireland and Niger attempted to pass a resolution on climate and security in the Security Council in 2021, it was co-sponsored by 113 member states beyond the Council. This demonstrates the widespread support for tackling climate-related security issues at the multilateral level. During the next General Assembly session, which starts in September, the General Assembly’s new president, Dennis Francis, could play a crucial role in building on this support. Holding open debates on climate, peace and security and offering opportunities for high-level events in September could help to consolidate member states’ views. And pushing for the co-facilitators of the Summit of the Future to include climate, peace and security would also help to keep member states focused on the issue.

2. Build on the new right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. Last year’s landmark General Assembly resolution (UN General Assembly Resolution A/76/L.75) establishing the human right to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment offers an important entry point for climate-related security issues. The strong links between human rights violations and violent conflict are well documented and could offer an important role for the Human Rights Council to take up this issue as well. The General Assembly’s recognition of environmental human rights should lead to greater focus on how violations can lead to risks of violence, and could be the basis for targeted actions such as investigations into violations of the right to a clean environment, or a call by the General Assembly for the Security Council to place climate on its agenda as a standing item.

3. Amplify the evidence. The General Assembly is able to establish commissions of inquiry and fact-finding missions on any issue it deems necessary. While in the past it has tended to create such bodies to address serious violations of human rights and humanitarian law, there is no reason the General Assembly could not also demand fact-finding around the security risks posed by climate change. Indeed, even the process of trying to establish such a commission could help to highlight the issue in a way that could also put pressure on the Security Council to act.

4. Mandate other bodies and enable financing. The General Assembly has an extraordinarily powerful role in setting the mandates of other bodies in the multilateral system. For example, it oversees the work of the Peacebuilding Commission and could consider expanding the commission’s mandate to include climate-related risks more explicitly. The General Assembly could also push for the IPCC to have a dedicated scientific track on climate, peace and security. In addition, the General Assembly’s Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary) could catalyse an increase in funding dedicated to climate, peace and security, in peace operations and beyond.

Ultimately, the General Assembly cannot be the only forum for advancing multilateral action on climate-related security risks. But greater activity within the General Assembly could have a ripple effect across the system, potentially driving action on other fronts, and even pressuring the Security Council to take up the issue more directly.

Dr Adam Day (United States/United Kingdom) is the Head of the UN University Centre for Policy Research in Geneva and leads programming on peacebuilding, climate security, human rights, global governance and emerging risks; Dr Florian Krampe is the Director of SIPRI’s Climate Change and Risk Programme.

IPS UN Bureau

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With most of its land only a few feet above sea level, Kiribati is seeing growing damage from storms and flooding. But even under a zero carbon emissions scenario, sea level rises would continue for centuries, causing massive human displacement and loss of livelihoods for billions of people. Credit: UNICEF/Vlad Sokhin

By Adam Day
NEW YORK, Aug 10 2021 (IPS)

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its starkest report yet, expressing a clear consensus on the rapid changes to global temperatures.

While this has been called a “code red” moment and a “wake-up call” for action, the report builds on what the scientific community has been saying for decades: climate change is irrefutably being caused by human activity and it is having system-wide impacts on every aspect of our lives today.

As Greta Thunberg points out, the IPCC report only summarizes the science, it does not tell us what to do. Unless we take a transformational approach to climate change, we will continue to collectively hit the snooze button long after the last alarm bell has rung.

A transformational approach recognizes that we are already beyond any of the best-case scenarios, views climate change as central to our collective security, and demands a new understanding of growth.

We are already beyond the 1.5 degree threshold

For the first time, the IPCC report lays out what would happen if we ceased all carbon emissions today. Global temperatures would stabilize in a few decades, reversing some of most pernicious effects of climate change.

But even under a zero carbon emissions scenario, sea level rises would continue for centuries, causing massive human displacement and loss of livelihoods for billions of people. And that is under a highly improbable scenario of a total end of carbon emissions right now – the reality is going to be much worse.

While the 1.5 degree goal is a useful tool to encourage emissions reductions and greater funding, realistically we need to start planning for some of the worst scenarios laid out by the IPCC and others. We need the kind of global disaster preparedness that was clearly lacking when the pandemic broke out.

The twenty-sixth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 26) to the UNFCCC will take place in November 2021 in Glasgow. Credit: United Nations

Climate is fundamental to our security

As our recent research has shown, climate change is acting as a risk multiplier for conflict and insecurity across the world, often causing risks indirectly through displacement, economic shocks, natural disasters, and rapid changes in livelihoods.

From climate wars to farmer herder conflicts, rising global temperatures are contributing to instability. This points to the need to move climate change from a marginal issue to a central one across all major areas of government: security, health, infrastructure, education, and development.

The Biden Administration’s decision to make climate change part of the US national security strategy is the right step. We will need to tackle climate holistically across all government functions rather than treating it as an isolated, standalone issue.

A transformational approach to growth

Estimates of what is required to cope with climate change runs into the trillions per year, already far outstripping the pledges made under the Paris Agreement. As global populations and urbanization increase together, the cost of climate change is not only rising dramatically, it constitutes an existential risk to our model of human development.

Mobilizing resources is part of the story, but if we pour those resources back into the same kind of energy consumption – or worse, if the pandemic response bypasses the safeguards put in place to protect the environment in a rush to build back better – it will be like putting a band-aid on an amputated limb.

What is needed is a more fundamental shift in how we view development and prosperity: rather than being measured solely in terms of Gross Domestic Product, we need to value and measure our collective wellbeing, the sustainability of our actions, the ability of our production to contribute to a cycle rather than an endless output of carbon.

While continuing to mobilize funds, the COP26 agenda needs to also push this more transformational agenda, to think of development as a symbiosis with our environment rather than a parasitic or predatory relationship between humans and the Earth.

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People wade through water during floods in the Kurigram district of Bangladesh. Credit: UNICEF/G.M.B. Akash

By Beatrice Mosello and Adam Day
NEW YORK, Jul 13 2021 (IPS)

Could the next wars be triggered by climate change?

Until recently, the question might have seemed like science fiction, but now it is very real. Ethiopia and Egypt are locked in an upward spiral of tensions over the Nile, as a combination of dams and shifting weather patterns pose existential risks to both countries.

In the Sahel region, climate-driven changes in pastoralist patterns have contributed to a massive spike in conflicts, while oscillations in the size of Lake Chad are influencing recruitment into the terrorist group Boko Haram.

From coral bleaching driving Caribbean fishing communities into organized crime to the drought that preceded the Syria war, a large and growing evidence base points to the fact that climate change is a real factor in today’s and tomorrow’s violent conflicts.

How can the UN – an organization established to prevent the kind of wars witnessed in the first half of the twentieth century – reshape itself to address the growing security risks posed by climate change?

The UN needs to undergo three related shifts to tackle climate security: (1) from sectors to systems, (2) from exclusivity to inclusivity, and (3) from sovereign rights to global public goods.

Taken together, these shifts will require the UN as an organization to transform from an exclusive club of powerful States making decisions behind closed doors into a hub that generates leverage by connecting different actors at local, national, regional, and global levels.

Systems not sectors

The UN system is structured as a series of loosely affiliated sectors, with bespoke agencies focused on single issues like refugees, food, health, migration, and the environment.

While there have been meaningful efforts to bring those actors together around common objectives – not least the Sustainable Development Goals and universal human rights – in practice the UN continues to operate largely on the basis of sectoral approaches to risks.

As a result, information and programming tends to be linked to a single agency’s mandate, driven by siloed sources of information.

But climate change cuts across these issues, exacerbating underlying socio-economic tensions and making indirect contributions to the risk of conflict. Erratic rainfall causes crop failure, leading to increased tensions over natural resources.

Extreme weather destroys arable land and displaces entire communities, driving conflicts over land and contributing to unplanned urbanization.

The pervasive and interdependent ways in which climate change is driving security risks should galvanize a shift towards a systemic mindset across the UN.

This means producing cross-cutting analysis that brings together disparate sources of information, as well as establishing effective ways to do multi-scalar risk analysis in which local, national, regional, and global trends are examined together. In short, it means thinking in terms of complex systems, rather than separate sectors.

Inclusivity not exclusivity

When responding to climate change, national governments are highly susceptible to various forms of maladaptation that may increase rather than decrease conflict risks. Facing massive land loss due to extreme weather, a government may reclaim land from the sea (e.g. in Bangladesh), or invest in new agricultural sectors (e.g. in Nigeria), without considering how these actions might create new competition over land, disrupt existing livelihoods, or contribute to large-scale demographic shifts.

And there is clear evidence that the UN’s support to State-led development and peacebuilding programming is highly susceptible to elite capture, potentially contributing to precisely the kind of inequalities that are a root cause of violent conflict.

If the UN is to tackle the growing climate-security challenge, it must place inclusivity (i.e. providing equal access to opportunities and resources for people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalized), at the heart of its work.

There are good examples of this, as in the ways in which UN peacebuilding has conditioned its support on gender inclusivity. The UN should place clear conditions on international support, by demanding that national governments account for potential risks to marginalized communities, clearly track whether funds are being captured by a small elite, and ensure that their national programming is inclusive.

Global public goods not sovereign-owned commodities

Despite clear evidence that our carbon-driven consumption is unsustainable, we still treat the environment as a commodity: something to be exploited for the benefit of human societies.

The commodification of the environment not only poses existential risks for humanity, but also drives conflict, as States and societies compete to own increasingly scarce natural resources, or use them in a way that negatively affects others.

The UN has to become an advocate for a shift towards treating the environment as both a global public good and an essential aspect of our peace and security architecture. As the COVID-19 pandemic response acutely demonstrated, collective responses to shared threats are not only the most effective approach, they are often the difference between large-scale life and death.

Last year, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution on our Common Agenda that committed to “transformative measures” to address climate change. To deliver on the commitment, the transformation needs to include a repositioning of the environment within the multilateral system.

This can take many shapes. Ecuador has given the environment legal personality, allowing for claims to be brought on its behalf for environmental destruction.

In May, a court ruled that a Royal Dutch Petroleum (the world’s ninth biggest emitter) was bound by the provisions of the Paris Agreement to reduce global emissions by 45%, demonstrating that our obligations to the Earth can have legal effect.

The Biden Administration has placed climate change within its national security strategy, giving real weight and clear priority to the links between climate and security. And there are interesting and dynamic proposals for transforming the UN’s Trusteeship Council into a guardian for the environment, or creating a Commissioner for Future Generations tasked with protecting the environment for the coming 100 years.

Regardless of what path is chosen, the UN should play a growing role in advocating for the environment to be exempt from the Westphalian mindset of sovereign ownership, pushing instead for a collective approach to our climate.

Just as, 75 years ago, the founders of the UN came together to build a multilateral system based on collective security responses, today the UN should reconstitute its institutions toward collective climate-security action.

Climate change is already bringing nightmarish science fiction scenarios into reality; only radical changes in our conceptions of collective action will help us wake up.

Beatrice Mosello is Senior Advisor at adelphi, the German think tank and organizer of the influential Climate Diplomacy project and Senior Fellow at the UN University Centre for Policy Research (UNU-COR); Adam Day is Director of Programmes at UNU-CPR.

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