Climate Security in the UN Security Council: Achieving More through Improved Knowledge and Increased Credibility

Mar 24, 2021 | Judith Nora Hardt, Michael Brzoska, and Alina Viehoff
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The German government should continue its efforts on climate change and security even after its membership in the UN Security Council has come to an end. Strengthening the knowledge base, developing a broad understanding of security, and linking climate change mitigation measures with crisis prevention instruments are important in this regard.

The German government has put considerable effort into establishing climate change as a cross-cutting issue on the agenda of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), one of the priorities during its membership. Nevertheless, at the end of its two-year term (2019-2020), the results of this effort are mixed. In particular, the German government has failed to pass a corresponding resolution in the UNSC. Instead, they had to content themselves with a short statement (the Joint Statement of July 2020) by ten of the fifteen UNSC member states, which identifies the dangers of human-made climate change to international security and conflict.

While the strongest opposition to a UNSC resolution on climate-related security risks came from the Trump administration, which blocked a resolution on climate change, other states joined the opposition. The permanent members China and Russia as well as Indonesia and South Africa (2019-2020 in the UNSC) refused to address the issue within the Security Council. The latter two fear that climate change could serve as a pretext for military intervention and would prefer to avoid an expansion of the issues dealt with in the UNSC, although climate change has a strong and widespread impact on these countries.

Despite these obstacles, the German government should remain committed to addressing the issue of climate change and security in the future. Two factors are of primary importance: firstly, underpinning the debate with more knowledge about the links between climate change, peace and conflict, and secondly, strengthening the credibility of Germany's position on security risks and the way they are dealt with.

For this purpose, the authors offer recommendations on five different levels.