CONCEPT NOTE
High-level PoC Week Side Event to the United Nations Security Council Open Debate on PoC
Thursday, 25 May 2023
8:30 AM – 10:00 AM EDT
Conference Room A, UNHQ in New York
Background:
In May 2023, the UN Security Council (UNSC) will convene for the annual open debate on the protection of civilians in armed conflict (PoC). Member States will reflect on the UN Secretary-General’s annual report on PoC, which addresses the year’s most pressing protection concerns facing civilians in conflicts around the world. For the fifth consecutive year, the Secretary-General’s PoC report will include references to the direct and indirect environmental impacts of conflict on human health and suffering, including through the report’s priority focus this year on the devastating impacts of food and water insecurity.
In 2021, the Security Council unanimously adopted resolution 2573, further condemning acts of violence that threaten or harm civilian and essential infrastructure. The resolution acknowledged the importance of protection for food systems, water, sanitation, and energy as essential services indispensable to the survival of civilian populations in conflicts. Damage to civilian and essential infrastructure was also recognized as a driver of forced displacement, as well as a compounding factor in the spread of infectious diseases, which is a major impediment to humanitarian and public health responses. Security Council resolution 2573 called on the Secretary-General to continue to include updates on the protection of such indispensable civilian objects in future reports as part of an overall assessment of the status of PoC.
Unfortunately, civilians and ecosystems continue to bear the direct and reverberating effects of conflict related environmental damage and an increased vulnerability to climate and environmental health risks.
Violence and instability impede governance and hamper essential services infrastructure. Impacts of conflicts on critical environmental infrastructure pose potentially lethal and long-lasting risks to civilian lives and livelihoods through: exposure to toxic hazards, including leakage from damaged industrial facilities and conflict pollution in agricultural fields and water systems; threats stemming from explosive ordnance (EO), including mines and explosive remnants of war; the destruction of essential public health services, including infrastructure that supports water, sanitation, hygiene (WASH) and waste management; and a breakdown in environmental governance, mitigation, and resilience capacities to counter the impacts of environmental harm and climate risks; among others. In addition to conflict, climate hazards and environmental disasters are expected to expose more than a billion people to sea level rise, flooding, droughts, and will likely drive the movement of tens to hundreds of millions of people in coming decades. Across many conflicts, explosive ordnance poses a serious threat to civilians and renders civilian infrastructure and assets essential to people’s livelihoods and water and food security unusable. EO littered on land exposes farmers to death and injury or makes it unavailable for cultivation, severely disrupting livelihoods reliant on agricultural production. The presence of EO in water systems prevents adequate irrigation of land, causing long-term damage to arable land.
