Chapter 5. Conclusions and Recommendations

The roles to be played by the UN and other international organizations in dealing with environmental security are emerging. The UN has several potential roles:

• Addressing environmental "causes"/"components" of crises and wars;
• Helping to prevent environmental pressures that could trigger armed conflict;
• Addressing environmental "effects" of war, however caused;
• Helping to establish rules of engagement vis-a-vis the environment;
• Amending the existing conventions, elaborating new ones to handle emerging environmental security issues, and monitoring environmental security issues in existing conventions;
• Identifying and holding the responsible parties liable;
• International research and study of these roles;
• Forecasting and monitoring environmental emergencies;
• Providing/initiating/coordinating as needed international relief operations in environmental emergencies, especially those of transboundary or regional significance

Several expressed interest in creating an environmental guide or handbook. The appropriate DOD channel should explore the possibility of having the U.S. Mission to the UN recommend the development of such a guide.

Military forces should remain familiar with the existing international conventions and protocols and the non-military threats they address. This may require a library function built on the results shown in Volume II, by which the military force will have complete, immediate and ready reference to this information.

The scenario development approach has merit not only in forcing attention to potential environmental security situations, but also in analyzing the possible responses and responsibilities that may ensue. Scenarios can be particularly beneficial in anticipating the situations in which vacuums exist since these could escalate before effective action is implemented. The scope of this contract did not permit a more rigorous analysis, but a set of more mature environmental threat scenarios should be written with potential UN interventions.

In addition, military forces should monitor the emerging responsibilities carefully, perhaps by establishing liaison with other organizations that have already been designated as responsible for certain situations.

Conceptual tools should be developed to facilitate this tracking process. The UN system and the concept of environmental security are complex. To assist communications among a range of relevant personnel, it would be helpful to reach agreement about a common conceptual framework or tool. Two initial conceptual tools are below.

The first tool below is a simple taxonomy for tracking the changing conditions of the UN’s role in environmental security:
Figure 5

UN’s role in addressing environmental effects of conflict within a country or transborder	UN’s role in addressing environmental causes of conflict  within a country or transborder
By UN force: How the law binds the UN forces and their action By non-UN force: what UN mandate might prevent or punish other's illegal actions	Through intervention before the conflict Through intervention during the conflict Peacekeeping and/or other UN or related IOs after the conflict

 

The second tool is offered by NATO. (Environment & Security in an International Context, Report No. 232, Bonn, Germany, NATO, 1999.) This classification system could also be used to track changing UN environmental security roles. This identifies four general types of environmental conflict:

• ethno-political conflicts
• migration conflicts (internal, cross-border and demographically caused migration)
• international resource conflicts
• environmental conflicts due to fundamental global environmental change