World in Transition: Climate Change as a Security Risk - WBGU

196 10 Recommendations for action
and Peru called for the Security Council’s mandate
to be extended accordingly. The United Kingdom –
one of the countries holding a veto in the Security
Council – then gave further clear political backing to
this issue a few months later, in April 2007, with Foreign
Secretary Margaret Beckett stressing the security
dimension of climate change in a speech to the
Security Council. However, the extremely restrained
position of the USA and China, as veto-holding powers,
suggests that realistically, a formal expansion of
the Security Council’s agenda is unlikely to occur in
the near future, especially given that this particular
aspect was absent from the relevant report on UN
reform, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility
(UN, 2004). Nonetheless, the fact that climate
change has been addressed before the highest
body in the United Nations has raised its media profile
and is a symbolic step towards ensuring that the
importance of this issue is not downplayed in international
diplomacy, and has also established a practical
basis for further discussion in future. WBGU therefore
urges further exploring the pros and cons of a
broader mandate for the Security Council within the
overall framework of the UN reform debate.
One option in this context is to invoke the concept
of ‘ responsibility to protect’, by means of which
the United Nations claims high moral authority. The
responsibility to protect was developed specifically
in order to prevent future failures by the United
Nations such as those which weigh on the international
community’s conscience as a result of its inaction
in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia (Fröhlich,
2006; Hilpold, 2006). In view of the conflict potential
that could be unleashed by the impacts of climate
change, this principle could provide a remedy and be
modified and expanded accordingly. The Security
Council could perhaps charge the newly established
UN Peacebuilding Commission with addressing the
specific tasks arising from this principle, although it
must be ensured that this does not overstretch the
Commission’s mandate to an impermissible extent.
The Commission’s primary task is to strengthen the
capacities of the United Nations to propose strategies
for sustainable peacebuilding in countries torn
apart by civil war and to ensure that no resurgence
of violence occurs in post-conflict situations (Weinlich,
2006). However, in view of the additional pressure
from the problems associated with the possible
impacts of climate change, especially in fragile civilwar
countries, the Peacebuilding Commission should
also be able to address environmentally induced security
risks appropriately as part of its own mandate.
In general, it is important to emphasize that
authorizing and implementing military measures,
also in response to environmentally induced threats
to international peace and security, may only take
place in strict compliance with the United Nations’
monopoly of force. Pre-emptive measures by individual
countries or groups of countries outside the
scope of the powers granted under Chapter VII of
the United Nations Charter are therefore clearly
incompatible with international law, also in the context
of threatened environmental conflicts.
Strengthening the United Nations’
environmental policy capacities
WBGU reaffirms its often-stated recommendation
that the United Nations Environment Programme
( UNEP) be strengthened and formally upgraded
(WBGU, 2001, 2005). The French government has
launched a diplomatic initiative specifically with
a view to moving in this direction. In the academic
debate, too, the differences in the positions for and
against such a reform have noticeably narrowed in
recent years (Biermann and Bauer, 2005; Rechkemmer,
2005). Nonetheless, in view of some states’ political
opposition to such a move, it is highly unlikely
to take place in the near future, although member
states’ commitment to UNEP as the ‘global authority
and environmental policy pillar’ of the United
Nations is constantly reiterated, most recently at the
Global Ministerial Environment Forum in Nairobi in
February 2007 (UNEP, 2007).
In WBGU’s view, a substantive strengthening of
UNEP should take place without delay. For practical
reasons, therefore, this should initially begin below
the threshold for UNEP’s upgrading to the status of a
UN specialized agency, as also proposed in the report
Delivering as One on coherence in the UN system and
in the debate at the Global Ministerial Environment
Forum. In that sense, WBGU takes the view that all
measures resulting not only in additional budgetary
resources for UNEP but also providing the requis ite
stability for UNEP to engage in more secure medium-
to long-term financial planning should be supported.
This requires, firstly, multiannual financial commitments
from donors and, secondly, a reduction in the
proportion of earmarked funds.
In this context, the efforts to improve cooperation
between UNEP and the many UN agencies with an
operational mandate should also be supported. This
applies especially to cooperation with the United
Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (Biermann
and Bauer, 2004; Fues, 2006), and, in light of
the growing significance of environmentally induced
migration, the Office of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees ( UNHCR) (Section
9.3.4) as well. The relevant recommendations of the
High-Level Panel on System-wide Coherence are
to be welcomed here, as are the encouraging signals
sent out by the heads of the relevant UN agencies at
the first Global Ministerial Environment Forum to