Climate and Security: Statement During UN Security Council High-Level Open Debate

Your Excellency Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Your Excellency Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Let me begin by congratulating you, on your continued stewardship of the Security Council for the Month of February 2021.

Mr. President,

I welcome this High-Level debate as our understanding of climate change continues to reveal its role as a 'multiplier' of existing threats to international peace and security.

The International Community has responded elsewhere to the threat of climate change with ambitious solutions that are transforming economic development through investment that seeks to minimise environmental, social and governance harms.

We must do more to ensure that these new approaches to investment by the public and private sector reach the countries and regions worst hit by climate change.

As a start, we can recognise that persistent droughts, constant sea level rises, and increasingly frequent extreme weather patterns are reversing economic growth and development gains achieved over decades. The result is increased fragility to instability and armed conflict that then come to the attention of this Security Council.

The implementation of the Council's mandate to maintain global peace and security will only get more difficult with time if climate change remains on present course. Rather than wait for a future tipping point, we must redouble the efforts to direct all the resources and multilateral frameworks of our rules-based international order to mitigate the effects of climate change.

While the bulk of this work is happening outside the Security Council, as it should, no body with such a strong mandate should step aside from this challenge. That is why one of our priorities as Kenya, during our term on the Security Council, is to clarify the importance of the climate and security nexus.

Mr. President,

This nexus is already impacting Africa, whose files dominate the Council's agenda. Listen to us Africans when we tell you that the link is clear, its impact tangible, and the need for solutions urgent.

Africa unfortunately will suffer the worst consequences of climate change despite being the least responsible for global greenhouse gas emissions. Projected climatic changes for Africa suggest a future of increasing water scarcity, decreasing agricultural yields, encroaching desert, and damaged coastal infrastructure.

Examples abound on the consequences. The drought-stricken Horn of Africa, the drying Lake Chad Basin, and the shrinking Sahel and Savannah grasslands, have worsened economic vulnerabilities, and set in motion political, demographic and migratory dynamics that increase the threat of insurgency and violent extremism.

I hope that the Council will listen more carefully, and respond, to the new, innovative tools for climate-related conflict-prevention and resilience building that can emerge from the Peacebuilding Commission, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the UN Environment Programme.

I strongly urge these bodies to link early warning systems that map climate change hotspots to decision-making tools that enable conflict prevention at the national, regional and international levels.

Such tools include the building of dynamic and accessible modelling at the national and regional levels that allow government, and the multilateral and private sectors, to deploy solutions in a security-conscious, forward-looking manner. For such innovative work to have policy impact, it will require democratised access to critical data, and much more data sharing with African institutions, engineers and researchers.

Mr. President,

Allow me to finish with two recommendations that can be immediately acted on by this Council.

In crafting mandates for conflict resolution and post-conflict resolution, we can do more to ensure they dovetail with the efforts to deploy climate change mitigation and adaptation measures. In this regard, I applaud Security Council Resolution 2349 on Lake Chad and 2502 in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO) that have integrated measures to address the impact of climate change.

Fragile countries experiencing armed conflict or the threat of it receive little public or private investment. The lack of employment and opportunity, in turn, worsens the political and security crisis. The Council, and the relevant UN and International Financial Institutions that respond to its resolutions, can help alleviate this challenge by aligning conflict resolution, peacekeeping, humanitarian aid, and post-conflict reconstruction with job creation by the domestic private sector.

Another important, and prompt, action that the Council can take to boost peace and security in the most fragile regions in Africa is to act strongly against illicit financial outflows, illicit resource exploitation, terrorism financing and money laundering. Doing so immediately boosts the resources available to government to undertake climate change mitigation and offer the public services and goods needed to consolidate and protect peace. It also disrupts the negative forces who worsen the threat of climate change by making it tougher to tackle its security impact.

In conclusion, Mr President, let me affirm that Kenya will remain a strong voice for Africa and the Global South, including Small Island Developing States, in making the case for the climate change and security nexus. The world expects results and is looking to the Security Council to ever more effectively fulfill its mandate. A growing part of that work is likely to involve the conflict impacts of climate change.

Once again, I thank you, Mr. President for the invitation, and thank all members for their kind attention.