Can we restructure the United Nations based on the Climate Crisis?

Photo by Mathias Reding on Unsplash

The United Nations has several branches that make it an aid organisation, while it has some other branches such as the Security Council that deals with security. Right now while all hands are on deck for the climate crisis I propose a radical restructuring of the United Nations based on the global nature of the threat and the unique position of the United Nations in combatting these problems and in the process cleaning up its image.

The United Nations has a lot of critics, myself included, they have been criticised by poor developing nations, for being less representative of their cause, and they have been described as a polarised institution doing the bidding of the countries with Veto power. And yet it is the closest thing we have standing against global threats, threats such as climate change.

Is there a clear way out probably not but the scale of deployment we need requires the United Nations to be less worried about security and more about humanity? Which according to many social scientists is the opposite of what the UN has been designed for. Social scientists often claim that the UN was created to put Security before Human Rights. As it was a creation of the Cold War (obviously). But as it stands we need to address all the issues climate change poses to our world, and we need a concerted effort and we need it NOW. And if the UN and its many wings decide to treat this as a security threat more than a humanitarian one it will go back to backing wars and creating a global pole.

While if the UN does treat the climate crisis as a crisis that is faced by humanity as a whole and through its humanitarian works doubles down on the many facets of climate change it can create a corridor of human cooperation that will be more representative, less polarised and more able to face a global threat.

Last but not least, global warming poses a security threat if we consider it to be a global security threat, like if there was a meteor hitting the earth and we all had to put our resources together to fight it. While it can quickly become a regional threat, a national threat and if the UN starts taking sides then it will be another fuel to the fire that will ravage the earth.