First talk on DEALING with the impact of Climate change, rather than to claim they can make it go away. About time!


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U.N. to assess climate change as threat to security
POSTED: 10:28 a.m. EDT, April 17, 2007

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) -- Britain will try to convince reluctant U.N. Security Council members that global warming poses a threat to international peace and security when the body holds its first debate on climate change on Tuesday.

Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett chairs the meeting on an issue which remains contentious for many governments, including the Bush administration that has fought mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions that spur climate change.

Ministers from two or three impacted nations which are not on the 15-member council are expected to attend the debate. They include the Maldives, one of 37 small island states that fear they may disappear under the waves as the Earth warms up.

Many members, including Russia, China and some developing nations, question whether the issue belongs in the Security Council, which deals only with threats to international peace and security, as they feel the council is increasingly encroaching on the work of other U.N. bodies.

No resolution is planned in this first round of speeches.

"We are lukewarm because of where it is discussed," Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said. "The Security Council is not the right place for the debate. We didn't take a vote but there was not much enthusiasm."

Britain made its case in a "concept paper," distributed to U.N. members on April 5, that suggested large parts of the world risked being uninhabitable by rising sea levels, a shortage of fresh water or land suitable for agriculture.

"Some estimates suggest up to 200 million people may be displaced by the middle of the century," as a result of migration from rural areas to cities and across international borders, thereby increasing "the potential for instability and conflict," the paper said.

Provoking conflicts
Britain said conflicts were still likely to break out for a variety of other reasons, but said "the cumulative impacts of climate change could exacerbate these drivers of conflict, and particularly increase the risk to those states already susceptible to conflict."

Climate change is expected to complicate the existing competition for scarce energy resources, although if that change is gradual and managed it could lessen the risk of conflict, Britain said.

British officials have invoked the impact of the council's January, 2000 debate on AIDS, which had previously been viewed as a public health matter.

At that meeting, chaired by then-Vice President Al Gore, the United States said AIDS was changing the face of Africa and placed the issue in the context of U.N. peacekeeping operations, which the council authorizes.

The result was special AIDS awareness programs for peacekeepers, included in many council resolutions.

The U.S. Congress is thinking along similar lines. Senators Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, on March 31 introduced bipartisan legislation that would require an assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies of security challenges presented by climate change.