CiR2P Option 34 | UNSC authorisation under Chapter VII

DISCUSSION:

The use of coercive military force has dominated academic and popular discussions about R2P (much of it highly critical). Gareth Evans calls this focus ‘unfortunate’ because it has led many to ‘misunderstand R2P as being only about the use of military force’, when in fact ‘it is about much more than that – about prevention at least as much as, if not more than, reaction, and about many much less extreme kinds of reaction’. But, he continues – pointing to Rwanda in 1994 and Srebrenica in 1995 as examples where military intervention would have saved many thousands of innocent lives – ‘if there is one thing as bad as using military force when we should not, it is not using military force when we should ’.

The notion that coercive military force could be used to achieve climate-related human protection goals – for example, to protect human populations in the aftermath of a sudden onset event (eg cyclone, flood or wildfire), or a population in grave danger from a slow onset event (eg extreme drought) – have conceptual anchors in ‘ecological intervention’ and ‘eco-humanitarian intervention’. The former involves responding militarily to major environmental emergencies that could have grave transboundary consequences for human populations (eg a Chernobyl-style nuclear explosion). The latter in contrast, involves military intervention to prevent or halt deliberate and extreme damage to environmental assets, otherwise known as ‘ecocide’, critical to sustain human life in that country (eg water resources), irrespective of the spill-over effect. A third category, and the least likely to garner international support, involves military intervention to prevent or halt the large scale destruction of high value environmental assets (eg species close to extinction or rainforests) – again, an ‘ecocide’ situation – for their own sake, that is, with no serious human rights violations occurring.

Owing to the immense political, intellectual and substantive complexities involved in the debate about external military intervention for humanitarian and or environmental reasons (eg competing notions of ‘legitimacy’ and what constitutes a ‘just war’), this discussion does not seek to detail the precise circumstances in which the use of force becomes a live option for decision makers, but rather simply identifies the practical international legal avenues available to decision makers when seeking a coercive military solution in response to an imminent or occurring human protection catastrophe. 

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Chapter VII of the UN Charter is the international locus for the authorisation of coercive military force. The important provisions are Article 39, which says that ‘The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall…decide what measures shall be taken…to maintain or restore international peace and security’; and Article 42, which says that ‘Should the Security Council consider that measures provided for in Article 41 [less coercive measures] would be inadequate or have proved to be inadequate, it may take such action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security’.

These provisions provide clear guidance on the responses available for traditional cross-border threats to peace and security. However, for internal human protection catastrophes – as the R2P framework is primarily geared towards addressing – their application becomes less obvious. In such situations, what matters most is the Security Council’s interpretation of what constitutes an ‘international threat to peace and security’. As Gareth Evans explains: ‘with no higher authority to gainsay it, threats to international peace and security are what the Security Council says they are’ – and since the end of the Cold War, it has defined them quite broadly as it did in Bosnia and Somalia. However, this latitude in defining threats to peace and security has not been extended to the climate action agenda.

Nonetheless, since 2007 Western governments and successive UN Secretary Generals’ have formally advocated for the Security Council to recognise climate change is a threat to peace and security. For example, see Virtual Security Council Debate on Climate and Security, 23 February 2021.

• British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson: “It is absolutely clear that climate change is a threat to our collective security and the security of our nations”. Further, if the suffering and strife caused by climate change was done at the hand of “some kind of despotic warlord or civil war, then nobody would question the right and the duty of this U.N. Security Council to act.”
• US Climate Envoy, John Kerry: “the climate crisis is indisputably a Security Council issue … The climate threat is so massive, so multifaceted … we bury our heads in the sand at our own peril.”
• French President, Emmanuel Macron: “The fight against climate change and for the protection of the environment is a matter of peace and security … I call on the Security Council to take on these issues as part of its mandate.”

Western pressure for climate to be included in the UNSC mandate has increased since the Paris Agreement was reached in 2015. The most recent attempts occurred in September and December 2021. But as with all previous efforts, China and Russia opposed (abstaining and vetoing respectively in this instance) the Council even adding climate change to its formal agenda – let alone defining climate change as a threat to international peace and security – based on, first, an unconfirmed relationship between climate change and security, and second, the UNFCCC being the most appropriate site to address climate issues.

Despite this, there is a growing consensus among UN member states, and the INGO community that specialise in conflict prevention and response, that the Council needs to begin to formally engage with climate security issues as a matter of course.