The Foreign Minister of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Bert Koenders, emphasizes that climate change threatens international peace and security and speaks about his personal experience in Northern Mali, where he worked during his term as Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Head of the Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission (MINUSMA).
This interview was conducted at the Planetary Security Conference in The Hague, 5-6 December 2016.
"In 2015 and 2016 two things came together: One is that almost everybody in Paris agreed on the enormous consequences of climate change. Secondly, we see at the same time, an urgency of the international security situations - in different countries but also geo-strategically. And we see more and more, even if it is not digital, that there is a relationship between climate change and security. I have seen it myself when I worked in Northern Mali. You see the desertification as a result of climate change, resulting in scarcity, therefore conflicts of different groups of people that live there in very difficult circumstances. That often leads to the importation of terrorism of extremist groups who take advantage of this. It is an example of the relationship between security and climate change. Therefore, those who think still – there are only a few – that they can deny the climate problem and even if they are not interested in it they might be interested in the security and migration part.
We have to fix these issues together, and therefore it is important to get different disciplines, different politicians and different countries together to move in very practical and operational terms on this different nexus between climate change and security."
With climate change increasingly being seen as a security issue, we ask what role the United Nations Security Council could and should play. To answer this question, we are joined on the Climate Diplomacy Podcast by UN expert and Chatham House Associate Fellow Oli Brown. In this podcast, Oli explains some of the challenges that the UN Security Council has had in tackling climate change and outlines the prospects for action in the future.
Limited access to energy is a significant barrier to development and holds back efforts to improve living conditions in developing and emerging economies. Around the world, 1.1 billion people still do not have access to electricity, and 2.8 billion still rely on animal and crop waste, wood, charcoal and other solid fuels to cook their food and heat their homes.
As the earth’s climate warms, people face mounting threats from rising seas, and more intense and frequent storms, heatwaves, fires, and droughts. When these events hit, people want to understand whether they are connected to climate change. Linking climate change with heatwaves, storms and other events can help us prepare for a changing world, argues Peter Stott.
A recent report by the UNEP focuses on addressing trade in wildlife and forest products across the three sectors of crime prevention and criminal justice, trade regulation and natural resource management. It finds that there is less focus on the legislative means for preventing offenses related to trade in wildlife and forest products and more attention on the means for detecting and punishing such offenses.