Award Winner for Volume 12
Climate Change as a “Threat to the Peace”: Responding to Climate Change through the UN Collective Security System
The UN Security Council’s approach to collective security has been ever evolving since the time of the organization’s creation. While historically collective security was considered to concern the protection of states from external military attack, the Council has used its power to determine the existence of “threats to the peace” under Article 39 of the UN Charter to bring a broad range of situations and phenomena of international concern within its remit. Refugee flows, infectious epidemics, and challenges to democracy are just some of the threats to the peace identified by the Council in the post-Cold War era. This paper is concerned with the Council’s approach to climate change as a “threat to the peace.” Drawing upon Council debates and resolutions, it considers the manner in which climate changes and its effects have been conceptualized in such terms, and assesses the relationship between climate change and other recognized threats to the peace. It is demonstrated that considerable progress has been made in elevating climate change as an issue of the utmost international concern at the UN level, yet tensions between the foreign and domestic policy priorities of powerful states continue to hinder more proactive responses on the Council’s part.
Dr. Gary Wilson is Senior Lecturer in Law at Liverpool John Moores University, where he leads the LLM/MSc in Global Crime, Justice & Security and is co-ordinator of Doctoral Studies in Law His research interests centre broadly on collective security within the United Nations system, the use of force, secession and constitutional reform. His work is inter-disciplinary and Gary has published widely and spoken at numerous conferences both in the UK and abroad. He is the author of the monograph, The United Nations and Collective Security (Routledge, 2014) and currently writing a book on Constitutional Reform and Brexit (Routledge, 2022). He is currently Editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal, Liverpool Law Review.