Groundbreaking Day

I could not agree more with Margaret Beckett, UK Foreign Secretary who chaired the Security Council, that April 17 was a groundbreaking day at the UN Headquarters. For the first time, The Security Council debated climate change issue that could threatens world peace and security. At the debate, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stated that access to energy, scarcity of food and water could transform peaceful competition into conflicts and that the projected climate change could not only have serious environmental, social and economic implications, but implications for peace and security as well. He warned us that compared to the cost of conflict and its consequence; the cost of prevention would be far lower in financial terms and in human lives. Some country representatives expressed their disagreement to bringing the issue of climate change for discussion in the Security Council. They said that climate change and energy are issues for the General Assembly to deal with. The United States’ representative said that climate change presented serious challenges, citing the agreement at the meeting two years ago of the group of Eight leaders that energy, security, climate change and sustainable development were fundamentally linked. Brett Schaefer and Ben Lieberman, experts from the Heritage Foundation, somehow disagreed. They issued a paper, distributed to the members of civil society, saying that the security implication of climate change was merely speculative at this point and, even if they result as predicted, would not pose an immediate threat for decades, therefore, not appropriate for debate by the Security Council at this time. Margaret Beckett, stood her ground and argued that climate change is the issue that is right for debate by members of the Security Council and that UK was not the only country that held this view. There were 52 countries participated in the debate. Beckett also noted that a group of retired US generals recently put out a report projecting that climate change poses a serious threat to America’s national security and will act as a “threat multiplier” for instability in some of the world most volatile regions. They suggested that the US should integrate consequences of climate change into national security and defense strategies. France also supported bringing the issue for debate in the Security Council under its mandate “to prevent conflict”. China, the Russian Federation, and some other representatives of developing countries maintained their original position that climate change was the issue for debate by the General Assembly and by other appropriate international forums because the Security Council has no expert knowledge on this issue.

Filed under Environment, United Nations, World Affairs |