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Contributions from
the Column
Facts and trends
Results of renewables 2004
The security threat of climate change
Growth engine micro finance
G7 split on debt relief
Kenya: accusations of corruption
USA authorises generic AIDS drugs
GDI course for university graduates
Arab Human Development Report
ACP countries and EU sugar-regime reform
04/2005
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[ UN reform ]
Climate change is a security threat
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan intends to present his recommendations for a reform of UN security policy in March. That will help to set the agenda for a special UN summit scheduled for world leaders next September. Annan’s starting point is the report by the “High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change”, which was published in December 2004 (see D+C/E+Z 2005:1, p. 41). In his introduction to the report, Annan called for a broader, more comprehensive concept of collective security. However, the report mainly serves the purpose of bringing the USA and UN closer together in security matters.
A central risk for the 21st century is being overlooked in all of this: climate change. The report does not specifically mention climate change under the five main risks, but includes it under “Poverty, infectious diseases and environmental degradation”. Even the October 2003 study commissioned by the Pentagon, “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and its Implications for United States National Security”, came to the conclusion that climate change is a greater risk to the USA than international terrorism. The Worldwatch Institute says in its current annual report that “non-military” security threats are more dangerous than military threats, rating social factors and environmental change as equally risky.
Droughts, storms, floods, a higher sea level and the shifting of climatic zones will make obsolete progress made by many developing countries so far. Last year, the Berlin based German Institute for Economic Research reckoned that an increase of one degree in the global mean temperature by 2050 would cause damage amounting to two trillion Dollars. Bill Hare of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) estimates that the earth will already have warmed up by one degree by 2025 if no counter-measures are taken. He expects the mean temperature to rise by two degrees by 2050.
The institutional reforms the high-level panel proposed do not respond to these threats. The panel called for a reform of the General Assembly, the creation of a “Peacebuilding Commission” and the creation of a new Deputy Secretary-General responsible for peace and security. However, it would also make sense to expand the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) which is only a small agency and to turn it into a strong UN organisation with extensive powers, as environmental experts have been demanding for some time.
It is high time to understand that energy and climate policies are crucial for security. Expanding the use of renewable energy sources and increasing energy efficiency would help to prevent oil wars and free developing countries from the necessity of expensive crude oil imports. The reform panel has dealt with the symptoms but it under-estimated the importance of energy issues. Paradoxically, it even recommends the use of more nuclear power to stop climate change, and is thus advocating a technology, which spurs nuclear proliferation (not to mention the ecological consequences).
Kofi Annan must make climate change a focus of his security report and set new priorities. Otherwise he will not fulfil his own claim of meeting “the security concerns of all States — rich and poor, weak and strong”.
Stefanie Christmann
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