Earth threatened by 'slow genocide'

Security Council warns that global warming can be a destabilising force



NEW YORK - VANISHING shorelines, failing crops and food shortages threaten nearly every continent on earth, warns the UN Security Council, during a ground-breaking debate that pegs global warming as a threat to international peace and security.

Brushing aside objections from developing countries, which have insisted that the issue is not under the council's domain, the security body said on Tuesday that climate change is a destabilising force, on a par with 'a slow genocide'.

As food and arable land become more scarce, diplomats warn, farmers and fishermen will be displaced, and local wars over dwindling resources - such as the conflict in Sudan's Darfur - would become inevitable.

'While it may be difficult to quantify the relationship between climate change and international peace and security, there should be no doubt that climate change is an immediate global challenge whose effects are trans-boundary and multi-faceted,' said Singapore's UN ambassador Vanu Gopala Menon.

'There will be serious implications touching on politics, socio- economics, geography, security and the fundamental way in which we interact with nature and with each other,' he said.

Britain, which chairs the Security Council this month, decided to put climate change on the agenda after several recent studies and reports linked carbon emissions and global warming to human enterprise.

British Foreign Minister Margaret Beckett has called the issue too serious for the council to ignore.

'The implications of climate change for our security are more fundamental and more comprehensive than any single conflict,' Ms Beckett said, praising the discussion as a 'watershed' for environmental consciousness.

But many diplomats have disagreed, insisting that the 15-member Security Council, which is tasked with maintaining global peace and security, is encroaching on the turf of the 192-member General Assembly.

Even the president of the General Assembly, Sheikha Haya Bin Rashid Al-Khalifa of Bahrain, noted in an interview with The Straits Times last week that climate change and environmental issues are 'one package' which come under 'the competence of the General Assembly'.

Some of the most plaintive remarks have come from small countries, island nations and those already feeling the effects of global warming.

'This is not an academic exercise, but a matter of life and death for my country,' said the Nambian ambassador. In his country, the encroaching desert is swallowing once-arable land, while malarial mosquito populations are on the rise.

Several ambassadors from small island states, such as Palau, which lies south-east of the Philippines, also note that rising seas are killing the coral reefs they count on to draw tourists and fish for cash and food.

'The destruction of coral reefs is tantamount to the destruction of Palau,' said the country's UN representative Stuart Beck.

The United States, China and Russia were reluctant to expand the council's mandate to include environmental concerns, but eventually agreed to participate as long as the council did not issue statements or resolutions.

The Bush administration, which has taken a sceptical view of recent findings that human beings contribute to greenhouse gases and global warming, has stressed that energy independence is important to achieving stability, and emphasised that good governance would help countries adapt to uncertainty.

'The most effective way to bolster security and stability is to increase the capacity of states to govern effectively,' said US ambassador and charge d'affairs Alejandro Wolff.

'States that govern effectively can better anticipate and manage change and the challenges that come with change.'