NEW YORK - Russia vetoed a first-of-its-kind UN Security Council resolution casting climate change as a threat to international peace and security, a move that sank a years-long effort to make global warming more central to the U.N.'s most powerful body.
The proposal was led by Ireland and Niger and called for incorporating information about the security implications of climate change into the council's strategies for managing conflicts and into peacekeeping operations and political missions, at least sometimes.
The measure asked the UN secretary-general to make climate-related security risks a central component of conflict prevention efforts and report on how to address those risks in specific hotspots.
Irish Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Nason said it was long overdue that the U.N. s foremost security-related body take up the issue.
The council has been around to discuss the security implications of climate change since 2007 and the General Assembly has been deeply concerned about the issue in 2009. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has sounded alarms and told the Security Council last week that the effects of climate change compounded conflicts and exacerbated fragility. The council passed resolutions that mention the destabilizing effects of warming in specific places, such as various African countries and Iraq. Monday's resolution would have been the first to deal with climate-related security danger as an issue of its own.
The proposal said stronger storms, rising seas, more frequent floods and droughts and other effects of warming could cause social tensions and conflict, potentially posing a key risk to global peace, security and stability. 113 of the 193 member countries of the U.N. supported it, including 12 of the 15 members of the council.
India and veto-wielding Russia voted no, while China abstained.
Their envoys said the issue should remain with broader UN groups, such as the Framework Convention on Climate Change. The opponents said that if we add climate change to the Security Council's purview would only deepen global divisions that were pointed up by last month's climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland. The talks ended in a deal that was committed to a key goal for limiting warming and broke some new ground but fell short of the U.N.'s three big goals for the conference.
Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia complained that Monday s proposed resolution would turn a scientific and economic issue into a politicized question, divert the attention of the council from what he called genuine conflicts in various places and give the council a pretext to intervene in virtually any country on the planet.
He said that this approach would be a ticking time bomb.
India and China questioned the idea of tying conflict to climate, and they predicted trouble for the Glasgow commitments if the Security Council imposes sanctions and dispatches peacekeeping troops.
"What the Security Council needs to do is not a political show," said Chinese Ambassador Zhang Jun.
The measure's supporters said it was a modest and reasonable step to take on an issue of existential importance.
Today was an opportunity for the council to recognize the reality of the world we are living in, and that climate change is increasing insecurity and instability, Byrne Nason said. We have missed the opportunity for action, and we look away from the realities of the world we are living in. Proponents pledged to keep the council's eye on climate risks.
Niger s ambassador Abdou Abarry said the force of the veto can block the approval of a text, but it cannot hide our reality.