The United Nations may resort to military action against states that defy its mandates on global climate action, according to Ole Wæver, a prominent international relations professor at the University of Copenhagen.
In an interview with ABC News in Australia, Professor Wæver cautions that what he sees as “climate inaction” might draw the U.N. into considering other means to ensure its goals are met, even if that leads to global armed conflict.
Professor Wæver says more resistance to change could potentially threaten democracy although the U.N. would counter that the end justified the means in much the same way countries like Greece had their debt crisis solutions forced on them by European Union bureaucrats in Brussels and Strasbourg.
“The United Nations Security Council could, in principle, tomorrow decide that climate change is a threat to international peace and security,” he says.
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“And then it’s within their competencies to decide ‘and you are doing this, you are doing this, you are doing this, this is how we deal with it’.”
He believes classifying climate change as a security issue could leave the door open to more extreme policy responses.
“That’s what happens when something becomes a security issue, it gets the urgency, the intensity, the priority, which is helpful sometimes, but it also lets the dark forces loose in the sense that it can justify problematic means,” he says.
This urgency, he says, could lead to more abrupt – and essentially undemocratic – action at an international level.