I only briefly scanned this article and decided to post it here. It seems like the UN is taking notice of problem and is already working on ways to help improve the situation. Initially the meeting was opposed by other nations who did not feel the global warning was that big of an issue. According to the article, this is the first time climate change will be debated as a matter of international peace and security.
UNITED NATIONS (AP)—The U.N. Security Council held a groundbreaking debate Tuesday on the impact of climate change on conflicts, brushing aside objections from developing countries that global warming is not an issue of international peace and security.
Britain holds the council presidency this month and organized an open meeting to highlight what its foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, said was the “security imperative” to tackle climate change because it can exacerbate problems that cause conflicts and threatens the entire planet.
“The Security Council is the forum to discuss issues that threaten the peace and security of the international community. What makes wars start? Fights over water. Changing patterns of rainfall. Fights over food production, land use,” Beckett said. “There are few greater potential threats to our economies too ... but also to peace and security itself.”
“This is a groundbreaking day in the history of the Security Council, the first time ever that we will debate climate change as a matter of international peace and security,” she said.
The two major groups representing developing countries—the Non-Aligned Movement and the Group of 77—wrote separate letters accusing the Security Council of “ever-increasing encroachment” on the role and responsibility of other U.N. organs.
Climate change and energy are issues for the General Assembly, where all 192 U.N. member states are represented, and the Economic and Social Council, not the Security Council, they said.
Pakistan’s Deputy Ambassador Farukh Amil, whose country heads the Group of 77 which represents 132 mainly developing countries and China, told the council Tuesday that its debate not only “infringes” on the authority of other U.N. organs but “compromises the rights of the general membership of the United Nations.”
Beckett, who spent five years as Britain’s negotiator on climate change, said she understood the reservations.
“I’m the last person to want to undermine the important work that those bodies do,” she said, “but this is an issue that threatens the peace and security of the whole planet, and the Security Council has to be the right place to debate it, and clearly if 52 countries wish to speak, that isn’t just a view held by the United Kingdom.”
Beckett said Britain was following the precedent of the first Security Council debate on another very important global issue—HIV/AIDS in 2000. “We want to see the same thing happen with climate change, that it comes from the fringes into the mainstream,” she said.
Over the past few years, she said, the threat from climate change has grown and its impact goes far beyond the environment “to the very heart of the security agenda.”
She cited flooding, disease and famine leading to unprecedented migration; drought and crop failure intensifying competition for food, water and energy; and the potential for economic disruption on a scale not seen since World War II.
On Monday, Beckett noted, top U.S. retired admirals and generals warned in a new report that climate change is a “threat multiplier for instability.” She said Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, whose economy depends on hydropower from a reservoir that is already depleted by drought, has called climate change “an act of aggression by the rich against the poor.”
“He is one of the first leaders to see this problem in security terms,” Beckett said. “He will not be the last.”
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the council that projected climate changes can not only have serious environmental, social and economic implications but implications for peace and security as well.
“This is especially true in vulnerable regions that face multiple stresses at the same time—pre-existing conflict, poverty and unequal access to resources, weak institutions, food insecurity, and incidence of diseases such as HIV/AIDS,” he said.
Ban outlined several “alarming, though not alarmist” scenarios, including limited or threatened access to energy increasing the risk of conflict, a scarcity of food and water transforming peaceful competition into violence, and floods and droughts polarizing societies and weakening the ability of countries to resolve conflicts peacefully.
The world must come together—including civil society and the private sector—to prevent these scenarios from becoming reality, he said.
Ban noted that his predecessor, Kofi Annan, warned that “environmental degradation has the potential to destabilize already conflict-prone regions” and urged member states to agree on ways “that allow all of us to live sustainably within the planet’s means.”
The secretary-general said he wanted “to renew and amplify this call.”
“Compared to the cost of conflict and its consequences,” Ban said, “the cost of prevention is far lower—in financial terms but most importantly in human lives, and life quality.”
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