NEW YORK – Russia on Monday vetoed a UN Security Council resolution, the first of its kind casting climate change as a threat to international peace and security, a vote that thwarted a years-long effort to create global warming A more central idea for the most powerful body of the United Nations.
led by Ireland And Niger, the resolution called for “incorporating information on the security effects of climate change” into the council’s strategies for managing conflicts and in peacekeeping operations and political missions.
The measure also asked the UN Secretary General to make climate security risks Reporting on “a central component” of conflict prevention efforts and how to address those risks in specific hotspots.
Irish Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Naison said “it is long overdue” that the UN’s premier security-related body take up the issue.
The Council has discussed the security implications of climate change occasionally since 2007, and the wider General Assembly declared itself “deeply concerned” about the issue in 2009. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has also sounded the alarm, telling the Security Council last week that the impact of climate change “compounds increased conflict and fragility.”
The council has passed resolutions that address the destabilizing effects of warming in specific locations, such as various African countries and Iraq. But Monday’s resolution would have been the first devoted to a climate-related security threat as an issue of its own.
Strong storm, rising seas, more frequent floods And dried And other effects of warming could spark social tensions and conflict, potentially “posing a significant risk to global peace, security and stability,” the proposed resolution said. About 113 of the 193 member states of the United Nations supported it, including 12 of the 15 members of the Council.
but India and veto russia Did not vote, while China refrained.
Their envoys said the issue should remain with broader UN groups, such as the Framework Convention on Climate Change. Adding climate change to the purview of the Security Council will only deepen the global divide that was pointed out last month climate talks In Glasgow, Scotland, opponents said. The talks ended in a deal that recommended a major goal to limit warming and broke some new ground but fell short of the UN’s three big goals for the convention.
Russian ambassador Vasily Nebenzia complained that Monday’s proposed resolution would “turn a scientific and economic issue into a political question,” divert the council’s attention from “real” sources of conflict in various places and give the council an opportunity to intervene virtually. Will give an excuse any country on the planet.
“This approach will be a ticking time bomb,” he said.
India and China questioned the idea of linking conflict with climate, and they predicted trouble for Glasgow commitments if the Security Council – a body that can impose sanctions and send peacekeepers – begins to weigh more. does it.
“What the Security Council needs to do is not a political show,” Chinese ambassador Zhang Jun said.
Proponents of the measure said it represented a modest and reasonable step forward on the issue of existential importance.
“Today was an opportunity for the Council to recognize for the first time the reality of the world we live in and the increasing insecurity and instability of climate change,” Byron Neeson said. “Instead, we have missed the opportunity for action, and we look away from the realities of the world we live in.”
Supporters vowed to keep an eye on the council on climate risks.
“The force of a veto can block the approval of a text,” Niger’s ambassador Abdu Abri said, “but it cannot hide our reality.”