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Environmental security: a task for the UN system

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Mark F. Imber
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Extract

Two issues have dramatized the revived potential for a decisive UN contribution to diplomacy in the 1990s. One is the rise of the environmental agenda as an issue at once, both genuinely global, and politically divisive. Conflict is generated because global warming, acid deposition, ozone depletion and marine pollution create real but also differential costs to the states of the world. The second issue, apparent since 1989, is the renewed opportunities for peacekeeping, and the credibility of economic sanctions created by the end of the Cold War and the onset of the Gulf Crisis. Some environmental threats, such as the potential consequences of rising sea-levels, also impinge on traditional military-territorial concepts of security. The fusion of these issues has given rise to the idea of environmental security which generates both an opportunity and a test for the UN's revival as a focus of multi-lateral diplomacy.

Type
Review Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , April 1991 , pp. 201 - 212
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1991

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References

1 See also Haslam, Jonathan‘The UN and the Soviet Union: new thinking?’ International Affairs, 65 (1989), pp. 677–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See United Nations Association of the USA, Washington Weekly Report, XVI-28, 10 August 1990, also XVI-34, 19 October 1990Google Scholar.

3 Kay, David and Skolnikoff, Eugene B., World Eco-Crisis, International Organizations in Response (Wisconsin, 1972)Google Scholar; Boardman, R., International Organization and the Conservation of Nature (London, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kay, David and Jacobsen, H. K. (eds.), Environmental Protection, The International Dimension (Allanheld, Osmun, 1983)Google Scholar.

4 The Brandt Commission, Common Crisis: North South Co-operation for World Recovery (London, 1983)Google Scholar, Barney, Gerald O (director), The Global 200 Report to the President (Harmondsworth, 1982)Google Scholar, World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland, G. H., chairman). Our Common Future (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar.

5 A wide range of issues are addressed in a series of works prepared by a continuing UNEP-SIPRI-PRIO series. Westing, A. (ed.), Global Resources and International Conflict (Sipri-Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar; also, Comprehensive Security for the Baltic; an Environmental Approach (Sage, 1989)Google Scholar, also, Environmental Warfare (Taylor and Francis, 1984)Google Scholar. Also Wirth, David A, ‘Climate Chaos’, Foreign Policy (1989), pp. 3–22Google Scholar.

6 The eighteen Consultative Parties are the seven claimants, Argentina, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway and UK, and five other original signatories of 1959, Belgium, Japan, South Africa, USSR and USA. Six other states have been admitted (by consensus decision of the existing Consultative Parties), on the basis of the record of scientific research, Poland (1977), West Germany (1981), Brazil and India (1983), China and Uruguay (1985).

7 See, IAEA, Statute, Article VI and ILO, Constitution, Article 7.

8 Molina, Mario J. and Rowland, F. S., ‘Stratospheric Sink for Chlorofluorornethanes: Chlorine Atomic-Atalysed Destruction of Ozone’, Nature, 249 (June, 1974), pp. 810–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Brandtland, G. H., Our Common Future, p. 303Google Scholar, and UNEP, Profile, Nairobi 1987, p. 30.

10 See United States General Accounting Office, US Participation in the Environment Program (GAG-NSIAD-89-142) June, 1989Google Scholar.