U.N. discusses climate change

The Security Council held its first debate about climate change Tuesday, an issue not usually considered within its international-security scope.

But to overcome the objections of countries that said global warming was not a threat to peace and security, the council resolved to take no action on the subject.

That did not stop nations such as Britain, which currently holds the council presidency, from arguing during the daylong session that global warming would work its way onto the council’s agenda one way or another.

“The Security Council is the forum to discuss issues that threaten the peace and security of the international community,” said British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, who came to New York to chair the special session.

“What makes wars start? Fights over water. Changing patterns of rainfall. Fights over food production, land use,” she said.

Many developing nations had argued that the General Assembly and U.N. agencies devoted to the environment should take the lead on global warming, and that the Security Council was overreaching its expertise and authority.

China’s deputy ambassador, Liu Zhenmin, said that the council was not sufficiently expert or representative to deal with the issue. “The developing countries believe that the Security Council has neither the professional competence in handling climate change, nor is it the right decision-making place for extensive participation leading up to widely acceptable proposals,” he said.

The Security Council has broadened the concept of threats to peace and security in the last several years. In 2000, it began considering the risks posed by HIV/AIDS, and has discussed how poverty can engender conflict and terrorism.

Island nations that are sinking as ocean levels rise said that climate change posed the biggest threat to them, and they expected the Security Council, whose decisions are legally binding, to help.

“The dangers that the small island states and their populations face are no less serious than those nations threatened by guns and bombs,” said Robert Aisi, the ambassador of Papua New Guinea.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who supported the debate, has suggested a high-level meeting on climate change, perhaps on the margins of the 62nd General Assembly in September. He has been trying to secure the participation of the United States, which has rejected the requirements of the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

A recent report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which concluded that the effects of global warming were more dire than expected, has added urgency to the debate.

The debate also drew momentum from a report released Monday, in which a panel of retired U.S. military leaders called climate change a security threat.

The report, produced by the Center for Naval Analysis, a federally funded nonprofit research organization based in Virginia, reinforces the idea that climate change can be a “threat multiplier” that can transform volatile situations into crises as people flee natural disasters and fight over Arctic shipping lanes and dwindling farmland.

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maggie.farley@latimes.com