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India Dismisses US-Led Efforts to Link Climate Change With Peace & Security

14:35, 14 June 2023

Dhairya Maheshwari

The EU and the US have said that climate change is posing an increasing threat to “global stability and international security”. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said that the organization is “integrating climate risks into our political analysis, as well as conflict prevention and peacebuilding initiatives”.

Sputnik

There is “little scientific correlation or evidence” of the impact of climate change on peace and security, Ruchira Kamboj, India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, stated on Tuesday.

Kamboj said that climate change was more about development and “less about peace and security”.

“Thus, any attribution of causes of conflict to climate change is nothing but oversimplification,” Kamboj said while addressing a UN Security Council High-Level Open Debate on Climate, Peace, and Security. “Choosing to place this in non-mandated forums, especially those where all members do not sit on an equal footing, may undermine the larger cause of securing climate justice.”

Kamboj noted that the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was an “appropriate forum” on the cause, where “the voice of the world’s smallest and most vulnerable nation threatened by climate change, carries an equal weight, with that of world’s greatest emitters.”

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The diplomat also remarked that the UN Security Council should be “clear-eyed” about its mandate of carrying out peacekeeping operations and by not delving into “non-mandated issues such as climate change”.

“We share the concern about the erosion of commitments on climate change, particularly on the scale of support to be provided to developing countries for tackling climate change. Finance, technology transfer, and capacity building are fundamental pillars of the Paris Agreement,” Kamboj said.

The Indian official also flagged efforts to “dilute, or divert resources in the garb of climate response” as well as “unilateral protectionist measures under the pretext of environmental concerns”.

India at Odds with West

Meanwhile, the US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Change John Kerry said at the UNSC meeting that there climate change was contributing to the risk of conflict across the world.

He suggested that politics of certain countries, particularly of those in Africa, had been changing due to natural events such as droughts, the floods and fires.

“The crisis is growing, it’s undermining our collective peace and security. And without concerted action from this body, and every single governmental entity that deals with this, without that effort, the world’s impact is going to get worse, and it will continue to threaten our peace, our lives, our security,” Kerry reckoned.