The United Nations and Environmental Security: Recommendations for the Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change
Publisher: ECSP Report
Author(s): Michael Renner and Hilary French
Date: 2004
Topics: Extractive Resources, Governance, Renewable Resources
Calling this post-Iraq moment “no less decisive than 1945 itself,” in 2003 UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan convened a High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change to improve how the United Nations prevents and removes threats to peace. Eminent world citizens like Brent Scowcroft, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Sadako Ogata, and Nafis Sadik were asked to recommend clear and practical measures for ensuring effective collective responses to the world’s security problems, ranging from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction to “soft threats” like extreme poverty and disease.
Environmental issues are firmly on the UN agenda, but they tend to remain discrete topics that lack sufficient coordination across agencies. The secretary-general has repeatedly maintained that environmental issues must be integrated into the UN’s larger development and security agenda, as outlined in his 2003 interim report on the prevention of armed conflict. In preparation for its December 2004 report, the High-Level Panel sought recommendations that, if adopted, would inject environmental issues into the security dialogue and transform speech into results.