UN Security Council Informal Expert Group on Climate and Security

Climate and security was one of four subjects Kenya's own delegation named, from the start of its 2021-2022 Security Council term, as a declared priority. Kenya chose this file itself; it was not assigned by rotation or crisis. President Uhuru Kenyatta himself opened the term's engagement with the subject at head-of-state level, addressing a February 2021 open debate that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson chaired, the first UK premier to chair a Council session since John Major in 1992.

Kenya's own statements throughout the term returned to a consistent argument: climate change is a "threat multiplier" whose security consequences fall hardest on the countries least responsible for causing it, and the Council's own African case files make the connection impossible to ignore.

That two-year effort built toward a single moment: a resolution on climate and security, negotiated by Ireland and Niger, that drew 113 co-sponsors (the second-highest total for any draft resolution in Security Council history), only to be vetoed by Russia in December 2021, with India voting against and China abstaining.

Kenya voted for the resolution but had deliberately declined to co-sponsor it, and its own explanation of vote is unusually candid about why: a Council product on climate change that lacked full consensus, Kenya argued, risked doing more harm than good to a file whose only real progress had come through consensus-based frameworks like the Paris Agreement. Kenya's own statement pointedly noted that some of the resolution's strongest Council backers were the same governments that had just diluted their own commitments at COP-26 in Glasgow weeks earlier.

Rather than let the veto end the effort, Kenya and Norway took over as co-chairs of the Council's Informal Expert Group on Climate and Security in February 2022, succeeding the resolution's own authors, Ireland and Niger. Over the following year Kenya's own record on the file broadened well past the Security Council itself: a Peacebuilding Commission session on the Pacific Islands, a UAE-convened Arria meeting on climate finance where Kenya proposed its own Defence Forces' "Environmental Soldier" peacekeeping initiative as a model, and two Kenya-convened side events applying data-visualization research on climate stress and conflict first to West Africa and, a year later, to Kenya's own Horn of Africa region.

The co-chairmanship closed in November 2022 with a joint Arria meeting and press stakeout with Norway, the same pairing that had opened it, arguing that the nexus of climate, peacebuilding and security deserved to outlast Kenya and Norway's own year in the chair.