Mapping the competing climate discourses around the United Nations Security Council

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has been discussing the climate-related issues particularly since 2007. While the UK, Germany and other European countries have been playing a leading role in securitising the climate issues at the UNSC, a wide range of developing countries particularly the small island developing states have substantially raised the climate security there. However, the concept of climate security has not yet received consensus while having confronted debates and been framed as competing ideas at the UNSC. This process of constructing the climate security of the UNSC is dynamic and complicated. The climate discussions at the UNSC are very different to those at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). While the UNFCCC focuses on mitigation, adaptation, financial approaches and responsibilities, the UNSC interrogates links between climate crisis and security. The security can be linked to conflicts, economic and social development and non-traditional security concerns. Thus, this research raises a question: how have climate security been discursively constructed at the UNSC over time. By employing discourse coalitions as a theoretical and analytical approach, this research identifies conflicts, development-based problems and ecological priority as main discourses. It selects the years 2007,2017and 2021 as critical moments for observing the climate debates at the UNSC. The first session of the climate debate was held in 2007. The 2017 climate debate was delivered following the 2015 Paris Climate Conference and the 2017 US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. The 2021 climate debate had been constructed around the emerging era of announcing net-zero carbon goals. These critical moments have been important opportunities for understanding the dynamic construction of links between climate and security at the UNSC. The main argument is that a wide range of countries including developed and developing countries have been moving towards a position on recognizing the link between climate and security. However, the debates over climate security have been moving away its links to conflicts and instead they have been reconstructed as non-traditional security and been raised on the political agenda of the UNSC. It can be supported by that the discourse coalition of ecological security has been growing to cover the gap between the conflicts-rooted discourse and the development-oriented discourse. On the basis of these findings, the research concludes that the controversial debates on defining the climate security at the UNSC continue. And, they require clarifying the role of the UNSC in global climate governance and particularly distinct its functions from that of the UNFCCC.