Last week's discussion at the U.N. Security Council on the security implications of climate change was an important step in the right direction. This is only the second time that the subject, which may turn out to be the defining issue for global security in the 21st century, has made it onto the agenda of the U.N. body charged with maintaining international peace and security.
The discussion's importance is limited, however, since the real path to addressing the security implications of climate change lies outside the council. The special session, initiated by Germany, focused specifically on the council's role in preventing climate-induced conflict over increasingly scarce food, water and arable land. The solution to these conflicts, however, can only be found in reducing carbon emissions -- including by scaling up the deployment of renewable energy technologies and increasing energy efficiency measures -- and not in responding to climate crises once they have occurred.
Yet connecting the severity of the various threat assessments with a commensurate effort to shift the global economic system to a low-carbon pathway has proved difficult. While significant diplomatic energy has been expended, particularly on building the institutional architecture for what might be termed "global climate governance," this has not been matched by the requisite political will within countries or trust between them to effectively manage this global challenge. While high-level rhetoric abounds about the need to reverse the trend toward a rapidly warming climate, the
International Energy Agency estimatesthat despite the global economic downturn, global carbon emissions in 2010 were the highest in history -- 5 percent more than the previous all-time high in 2008.
Not only are actual emissions rising, but the current level of pledged reductions will not be enough to avoid climate change reshaping the global security landscape in the second half of this century. A
report by the United Nations Environment Program, released at the December 2010 U.N.-sponsored meeting on climate change in Cancun, shows that a very serious gap still exists between what nations pledged on climate change 12 months earlier in Copenhagen and what is actually needed to prevent a temperature rise of greater than 2 degrees Celsius, the current benchmark for avoiding the worst consequences of climate change. According to the report, "emission levels of approximately 44 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2020 would be consistent with a 'likely' chance of limiting global warming to 2 degrees C." Yet pledges made in Copenhagen would in fact lead to a global emissions level of 56 gigatons of CO2 equivalent, leaving a dangerous gap of 12 gigatons. Since then, no serious progress has been made on addressing this gap.
This means that, currently, despite the pledges and promises of global leaders, the dangerous predications for a world with a temperature rise greater than 2 C are set to become the defining features of the global security setting. It is impossible to precisely predict the destabilizing consequences of global temperature rises on a global level -- through, for example, large-scale movements of unregulated climate refugees or conflict over water resources. But as
British Naval Commodore Steven Jermy puts it, despite the limitations of climate modeling, "from a defense planning point of view, what matters is not to be able to say what will definitely happen, but rather to consider what could plausibly happen."
The
failure of last month's climate talks in Bonn to build any genuine progress on the fundamental political issues holding back a new "climate deal" -- at the heart of which is the ongoing debate over the historical responsibility of the industrialized Western countries in contributing to global warming -- highlights the scale of the challenge ahead. In particular,
the isolation of Bolivia, whose delegation bravely and correctly diagnosed the problem as a "lack of ambition," is a worrying sign.
As the Security Council chamber in New York echoed last week with the concerns of delegates about the profound security implications of climate change, the real question became, Can threat assessments and risk analysis be turned into appropriate action on emissions reductions before it is too late? The Security Council is right to elevate the issue of climate change to the top of the global security agenda, but its members must remember that it is their own intransigence in official climate negotiations in other multilateral forums that is creating this problem.
**Ben Zala manages the Sustainable Security Program at the Oxford Research Group, a U.K.-based think tank.
