The UN regime on global climate change

Two primary entities of the UN regime address the challenges of global climate change (GCC), the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the UN Security Council (UNSC). This chapter provides an overview of the efforts undertaken pursuant to the UNFCCC for developing the GCC strategies of mitigation, adaptation, and capacity building. The 2015 Paris Agreement provided much needed reinvigoration of the multilateral approach for addressing GCC. A continued lack of unanimity in the international community on the urgency to take concerted action presents significant challenges to the promise of the 2015 Paris Agreement. The UNSC’s perspective on dealing with threats to international peace and security has been expanding in recent years; however, in the formal sessions undertaken on the explicit issue of GCC, there was pronounced opposition, by developing nations along with China and Russia, for the UNSC to identify explicitly GCC as such a threat. This chapter examines the expanding role for the UNSC addressing threats to international peace and security where formally securitized issues are encompassing discrete challenges that could arise from GCC.