Climate and Environmental Security
Over the past few years, international organizations have increasingly put climate and environmental aspects of conflict on their agendas. Here, four aspects are worth noting:
Firstly, the UN is increasingly concerned with the unintended environmental and climate impact of its peace operations. Guidelines have been published on this topic, and environmental and climate officers have been deployed as part of missions.
Secondly, competition over natural resources can help trigger conflict. For example, aspirations to gain exclusive rights to the drinking water reservoir of the Jordan Basin constituted a key escalating factor in the war between Israel and its neighbors in 1967.
Thirdly, violent conflicts cause environmental degradation. Currently, due to the armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine, wastewater pumps in local coalmines have ceased to function and several pits have been flooded. As a result, contaminated water threatens to seep into the region’s groundwater.
Fourthly, and conversely, when parties to a conflict recognize that working together to remedy environmental damages and to prevent climate change related impacts is in their joint interests, this can have a mitigating effect. A current example is the mission in Somalia (UNSOM), where the resilience of communities against climate impacts is to be strengthened - and thus also a contribution to reconciliation and cooperation between local conflict actors is to be made.
Climate and environmental security is becoming an increasingly important issue for peace operations as well. In some cases, aspects are already integrated into mandates.
- In 2013, MINUSMA became the first mission required by its mandate to ‘properly manage its environmental impact’, for example in waste management and water access. Among other things, the mission has created a regional environmental management system.
- Further missions: UNSOM (Somalia), UNMISS (South Sudan) and UNITAMS (Sudan).
© Mike Erskine/Unsplash
OSCE missions are explicitly mandated to deal with environmental aspects. In the context of the OSCE’s second dimension (economic and environmental), some activities are aimed at defusing conflicts by addressing environmental problems and intensifying cross-border cooperation. These are primarily undertaken in the former Soviet area and in the Western Balkans.
Since 2017, the number of UN Security Council resolutions calling for peace operations to assess climate risks and establish adequate management strategies has risen. Among other places, this growing risk awareness is visible in the Sahel region and the Horn of Africa. There, the UN offices for West Africa and the Sahel (UNOWAS) and Central Africa (UNOCA) as well as the UN missions UNAMID (Darfur) and UNSOM (Somalia) were commissioned to address these issues.
In October 2018, the Department of Political Affairs and Peacebuilding (DPPA), the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) established the UN Environment Climate Security Mechanism as part of the most recent UN reform in the field of peace and security to ensure better coordination. In 2022, the Department of Peace Operations (DPO) joined the CSM.
In 2019, under the presidency of the Dominican Republic, the fourth thematic debate in the UN Security Council on the impact of climate-related disasters was held. In 2020, Germany again focused on this issue in the Security Council. However, both in 2020 and 2021, the UN Security Council failed to agree on a resolution on Climate Security.
The European Union also wants to mainstream the issue of climate and the environment more firmly in its foreign and security policy, among other things by linking it more closely to the implementation of the European Green Deal. A Climate Change and Defense Roadmap was adopted for the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) on November 9, 2020. In 2023, the High Representative issues a Joint Communication (HRVP) to the European Parliament and the European Council on the "impact of climate change and environmental degradation on peace, security and defense."
As of 18.09.2023