“Some of the security challenges we face today are, by their nature, short-term and acute. Others are longer term, but no less pressing. Over the years, the United Nations, Governments and the people of the world have come to recognize climate change as a deadly peril to our ecosystems and, by that, to our security and, indeed, our survival. We may in many cases in life have a Plan B – but we simply have no Planet B.”
Remarks by Jan Eliasson, Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, at the Munich Security Conference dinner to present the 2016 Ewald-Von-Kleist Award to H.E. Laurent Fabius and Christiana Figueres (Munich, 13 February 2016)
Photo: From left to right - Jan Eliasson (Deputy Secretary General, United Nations), Laurent Fabius (former Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Development, French Republic; President, COP21), Horst Seehofer (Minister-President, Free State of Bavaria), and Wolfgang Ischinger (Ambassador, Chairman of the Munich Security Conference). Credit: MSC / Kuhlmann.
2019 has only just begun, but it is already hard to imagine that there will be other extreme weather events with disastrous consequences such as cyclone Idai happening again this year. In all likelihood, such events will continue to occur as 2019 rolls on. Idai is, once more, proof of how devastating and toxic the mix of climate change, extreme weather events and poverty can be: Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe – countries that rank low in human development but contribute very little to global greenhouse gas emissions – suffer from some of the worst impacts of climate change.
adelphi has relaunched its exhibition Environment, Conflict and Cooperation (ECC) Exhibition to illustrate how unprecedented environmental changes interact with social, political, and economic risks to exacerbate conflict. We invite you to explore our online exhibition and to learn more about urgent issues of our time: climate, energy, migration, extractives, food and water.
Climate security risks are, by all interpretations, a global threat. But when it comes to setting a political climate security agenda, a handful of countries stand out. In an interview with Climate Diplomacy, Michaela Spaeth, Director for Energy and Climate Policy at the German Federal Foreign Office, highlights some of Germany’s goals and challenges in forwarding the issue during its 2019-20 membership in the UN Security Council.
The Planetary Security Conference 2019, which concluded on 20 February, saw a number of workshops being held on the Sahel region and specifically Mali, one of the Conference’s three spotlight regions. These workshops examined the region’s climate-water-security risks as well as the #doable actions and solutions to address these issues.