The rejection of the first-ever draft resolution on climate security put to a vote at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in December lays bare the deep divide on the topic within the international community. The objections by a set of major and middle powers have validity, even as climate change is likely to emerge as a major security issue in the near future. The only way forward is for the United States and its European partners to work to bridge this gap with these states, including Russia.
It was Russia’s veto that killed the UNSC resolution, which had support from twelve of the Council’s fifteen member states and was sponsored by Ireland and the Council president Niger. Russia was supported by India, which also cast a ‘No’ vote, and China, which criticized the draft, but chose to abstain.
Russia justified its veto by pointing to the lack of consensus among UN member states on the issue. It said conflict was a complex and poorly understood issue, there was no “automatic link” between climate and security, and the UNSC was not the right forum to discuss climate-related questions.
Many of India’s arguments aligned with Russia’s. New Delhi reiterated its longstanding position that climate change was a developmental rather than a security issue. It asserted that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), under whose auspices the annual climate Conference of Parties (COP) negotiations are held, was the proper body to take up the issue. China acknowledged the “potential to impact peace and security,” but said that climate change should not be securitized and developed countries should shoulder their historical responsibility on emissions.
It would be tempting to dismiss these countries’ arguments as spoilers to a nascent consensus on climate security. But this would be a mistake. As many as eighty UN member states are opposed or skeptical on a role for the UNSC in this matter. It is also true that academic research on the causal link between climate and interstate or intrastate violence has yielded mixed results. However, causality is much clearer on the adverse effects of climate change on human security — i.e. economic marginalization, health, and displacement. Intuitively, these can be seen as eventually leading to violence, or at the minimum, deepening fault lines within and between states.
Academic research has examined cases in what is currently a world of relatively modest warming of 1.1℃. As we move toward a likely increase of 2℃ in the next two decades, climate change will become a first-order phenomenon in the international system with natural disasters and extreme heat making some of the world’s most densely populated regions practically uninhabitable. In such a world, it is likely that links between climate change and instability and conflict will be much stronger.
The topic of climate security as a matter of international concern cannot be avoided for long. But the securitization of climate change, as with any other issue, is a double-edged sword. It raises the level of urgency, concentrates minds and potentially makes more resources available. On the flip side, it can create “states of exception” in which processes of ensuring buy-in and building up favorable opinion are short-circuited in favor of opaque decision-making by a select set of powerful states. The fact that the five permanent members of the UNSC are currently divided does not preclude them coming together in the future in ways that shortchange the rest of the world.
The core challenge, then, boils down to readying the international community for actions that do not open the door to hegemonic precepts or create new divisions, while safeguarding the vital interests of all states.
The most dubious of these precepts is the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a concept that emerged in the 1990s in North America and Europe, legitimizing coercive intervention in states in order to protect civilians from mass persecution or state repression. The development of an R2P-like doctrine on climate change is not a far-fetched possibility. France, backed by the United States, proposed coercive intervention when Cyclone Narvis hit Myanmar in 2008 to help victims who were supposedly being ill-served by national relief missions.
R2P or related humanitarian arguments were also deployed during the U.S.-led interventions in Libya in 2011 and Iraq in 2003. Both wars came at a huge cost and left even more instability and destruction in their wake than the original crises that triggered them. Any discussion of climate security in the United Nations ought to steer well away from the temptations of a new R2P-type doctrine or other coercive concepts.
Security also ought to be defined narrowly. If everything is considered to be security, then nothing is. Critics are rightly concerned that “climate security” could be used as a means to dictate developmental choices and priorities. Mitigation actions should therefore be explicitly excluded from climate security discussions.
Though the UNSC is tasked by the UN system for the maintenance of international peace and security, it may not be the right forum to take up climate security at this time. The UN General Assembly (UNGA) lacks the coercive powers of the UNSC but is fully representative of all member states, and has its own history of taking up climate security. A UNGA role in actions that directly prevent major loss of life, such as encouraging transnational early-warning systems for natural disasters, backing enhanced adaptation in conflict zones, and even facilitating proactive diplomacy in situations of future climate-magnified tensions, would be more legitimate and gain wider participation.
Adopting a case-based approach could also be beneficial. For example, Russia, China, and India introduced an alternative draft specifically focused on the Sahel, but the United States and its partners were not interested. Such an approach can act as a learning tool, even as further research clarifies the relationship between climate and security. Eventually an accretion of such cases may or may not forge a narrower consensus that is more generic in its scope. Care should be exercised in case selection. Africa has been a disproportionate focus of climate security attention, as have activities in the International Criminal Court, which opens such patterns up to charges of racism.
For their part, Russia, India, and other opposing states will need to be more open to accepting linkages between climate change and conflict. They also need to acknowledge that current divides are not so much North-South in nature as between a set of sovereignty-conscious major and middle powers and the rest.
Although Russia and others were consulted over the UNSC draft, the consultation did not ultimately succeed. In the future, the goal ought to be evolving a common understanding through compromise. This will inevitably take time. Divisive blocs like those we saw at the UNSC will worsen rather than help solve the challenges of a natural disaster-wracked world that is our likely future.
Sarang Shidore is Director of Studies at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Senior Research Analyst at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. His areas of research and analysis are geopolitical risk, grand strategy, and energy/climate security, with a special emphasis on Asia.
Image: Reuters.
