Imbuing climate security with positive peace: A peace continuum approach to sustaining peace during climate crisis

Climate change has become widely recognized as a security concern, prompting the United Nations to prioritize efforts to better understand and respond to climate-related peace and security risks. However, dynamics within the UN system and the wider policy landscape reveal ongoing political contestations, with different actors and states taking conflicting positions on whether climate change should be framed as a security threat or solely as a development issue, and the related implications for policy. For instance, in 2021 Russia vetoed a draft UN Security Council (UNSC) thematic resolution on the security implications of climate change, while China and India expressed concerns about the ‘securitization’ of the issue, arguing that it should be addressed exclusively as a development challenge and kept out of the UNSC. ¹ Also, several scholars have raised concerns over the potential risks of securitizing climate change, highlighting fears that such framing may militarize climate responses, overshadow development-orientated solutions and—more broadly—lead to misleading conclusions about the nature of contemporary conflict dynamics.