Securitization of Climate Change on the Agenda of the UN Security Council: Doomed to Fail?

To securitize climate change on the agenda of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) was first tried by the UK as early as 2007. Since then, to reach the goal, developed countries and/or some developing countries supported by the former have initiated not only thematic meetings but also formal and informal meetings to debate the security dimension of climate change at the UNSC, which has been depicted as ‘a threat multiplier’, ‘a source of international conflict’, ‘a cause of massive migration’, and so on. However, despite repeated efforts, securitization of climate change on the UNSC agenda has failed since it has neither gained public acceptance nor initiated policy change by this organization. Process tracing of the international efforts to securitize climate change on the agenda of the UNSC between 2007 and 2022 shows that the main reason for such a failure is straightforward; that is, China and Russia, two veto-players, have strongly opposed such efforts. The reason for China and Russia’s consistent opposition lies in the fact that both countries’ sovereignty over their own domestic energy security, i.e., supply security for China and demand security for Russia based on fossil fuels, trumps the securitization of climate change.