“Warming of the global environment could lead to major disputes that the Security Council might help resolve” British U.N. representative Crispin Tickell.
“If global warming does take place and…environmental degradation follows, there will be great risks of dispute between states about food…the use of productive land…the supply of fresh water…people who are maybe fleeing from particular environmental problems,” he said.
“And all these problems could be complicated by civil war, in the same way that in Africa at the moment the problems of environmental degradation are very severely complicated by civil war,” Tickell said.
He added that the Security Council should look into the problems.
Tickell, himself a climatologist, was speaking to journalists shortly after addressing a special meeting of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) on global climate change.
Tickell told ECOSOC the steady increase of so-called “greenhouse gases” — especially carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons and methane — could lead to a rise in average global temperature with incalculable consequences for human society.
“This problem is comparable in its scale and complexity with that which arose from the discovery of nuclear energy more than 50 years ago.”
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