• by Nora Happel (united nations)
• Wednesday, July 01, 2015
• Inter Press Service

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 01 (IPS) - U.N. officials, government leaders and civil society actors gathered Tuesday at the German House for a panel discussion on climate change as a "threat-multiplier".

The debate centered on a report titled "A New Climate for Peace: Taking Action on Climate and Fragility Risks." Commissioned in early 2014 by the G7 member states, the report was written by leading political research institutes headed by Adelphi, International Alert, the Wilson Center and the EU Institute for Security Studies.

The report underscores the significant impact climate change will have on foreign and security policies. It identifies seven compound climate-fragility risks and calls on leaders and decision-makers to "act now to limit future risks to the planet we share and the peace we seek".

The seven risk situations outlined in the report are local resource competition, livelihood insecurity and migration, extreme weather events and disasters, volatile food prices, transboundary water management, sea-level rise and coastal degradation as well as the unintended effects of climate policies.

The report calls on G7 member countries to take the lead in building resilience to climate change beginning at the national level and moving on to cooperation and integrated approaches on a multilateral and global level.

The G7 comprises Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.

According to the report, making climate-fragility risks a national foreign policy priority is the first necessary step for G7 countries. This will require them to develop capacities within government departments and create cross-sectoral working groups.

Secondly, G7 cooperation will be needed as a platform for concerted inter-governmental action based on the G7 countries' global status and shared commitment to action on climate change.

This should be complemented, thirdly, by multilateral cooperation within institutions such as the World Bank and the U.N. and, fourthly, by partnerships with local governments, non-state actors and partner states to ensure that global measures and decisions will result in local actions on the ground.

Jochen Flasbarth, State Secretary at the German Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety, made it clear that not every conflict or extreme weather event is linked to climate change. However, he said, the increasing number of both is definitely a symptom of that global problem.

Throughout the discussion, speakers repeatedly underscored the necessity of dealing with climate change not only from an environmental point of view, but also taking into account its implications on other policy areas such as development, economics and security, and thus recognising its cross-governmental nature.

Lukas Rüttinger, Senior Project Manager at Adelphi and one of the main authors of the report, welcomes the fact that some countries like Germany, the United Kingdom and France are pushing this agenda and moving climate change out of the environmental sphere.

"Compared to what we have seen about ten years ago, there are clear signs that the impact of climate change as security threat is given much more recognition by governments and foreign policy decision-makers today," he told IPS.

"The fact that the topic is now on the agenda of the U.N. High Level Event on Climate Change and taken up by the U.N. Security Council can be seen as steps in the right direction. However, that doesn't mean that enough is done yet."

Edited by Kitty Stapp

© Inter Press Service (2015) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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