Although claims about climate/conflict links remain contested, concerns that climate change will affect peace and security have gained traction in academic, activist, and policy circles. One set of pressures for responsive action has centered on the UN Security Council, which has held several often-contentious debates on the topic. Whether the Council should address climate change is a highly politicized question, tied to controversies about the Council’s mandate, membership reform, and the appropriate division of labor in the UN system. Lost in this political debate has been a more fundamental question—what exactly could the Council do? We examine six specific proposals for Council action culled from the academic and policy literature and the public positions of member states. These include incorporating climate risks into peacekeeping operations, developing an early-warning system, managing the threat to small-island states, engaging in preventive diplomacy, addressing climate refugees, and embracing a climate-related analogy to the norm of a responsibility to protect. For each proposal, our analysis—which is based on interviews conducted at the UN, archival research, and case histories of past instances of adapting the Council’s focus to new challenges—examines what it would mean and require for the Council to act. We also identify a series of measures that constitute a “pragmatic transformative” agenda. These steps recognize the poor fit between the climate challenge and the Council as it is currently constituted, but also the potential to use climate as part of a larger transformation toward the better Council the world needs.

This essay examines some of the reasons for the upsurge in interest in regional approaches to global environmental challenges. One reason is a growing sense of obstruction and drift at the global level. With the rate of formation of new global environmental agreements lagging, with many existing agreements seemingly stalled, and with the momentum of global summitry having faded, regions may seem a more pragmatic scale at which to promote the diffusion of ideas, the development of institutions, and social mobilization for change. Beyond political pragmatism, there are also conceptually interesting—if still debatable—arguments that regions hold promise for strengthening global environmental governance. The regional scale may offer superior conditions to the global for common-property resource management—although the historical track record seems mixed at best, and formidable barriers to collective action remain. Regions may be more conducive to promoting norm diffusion—although the causal direction appears to be more strongly global-to-regional than vice versa. However the conceptual promise of the regional scale plays out in practice, there is also a compelling ethical argument for a regional focus, as mitigation failures at the global level condemn particular locales to formidable challenges of adaptation.

If we are to think imperially about global environmental politics we must be clear about what we mean by empire, as use of the term often conflates two distinct trends. If “empire” means the resurgence of muscular American unilateralism, then the principal ramification is the need to understand international environmental cooperation not simply “after hegemony” but in the face of it, with American domestic politics a central consideration. If the term refers instead to broader processes of world economic restructuring that are not reducible to American foreign policy initiatives, then we need to situate global environmental politics in the context of changing global modes of accumulation and regulation. Although the two images of empire are not easily reconciled, some of their implications for the study of global environmental politics are shared. Both suggest the growing importance of studying contentious environmental politics alongside more familiar cooperation-theoretic approaches. Also, both suggest that tensions between the localized and non-localized meanings of the world's forests, rivers, watersheds, and coastlines will be at the center of such contention.

In affluent societies, evidence suggests that public concern and activism about “the consumption problem” is growing in many corners of everyday life—even in the paragon of the consumer society, the United States. These emerging concerns have an environmental dimension, but also embrace issues of community, work, meaning, freedom, and the overall quality of life. Yet the efforts of individuals, groups, and communities to confront consumption find little guidance or sympathy in policy-making, environmental, or academic circles—arenas dominated, perhaps as never before, by a deeply seated economistic reasoning and a politics of the sanctity of growth. Given our dissatisfaction with fragmentary approaches to consumption and its externalities, we highlight the elements of a provisional framework for confronting consumption in a more integrated fashion. We stress in particular the social embeddedness of consumption, the material and power-based linkages along commodity chains of resource use, and the hidden forms of consumption embedded in all stages of economic activity.

Economic globalization demands two important adjustments in how we understand and undertake efforts to protect the global environment. One critical but overlooked effect of globalization is its impact on the “sustaining middle”—the large but fragile stratum of the Earth's population that lives, works, and consumes in ways most closely approximating genuine sustainability. Although we tend to view the world in dichotomous North/South terms, perhaps the greatest challenge of global environmental protection is to stem the corrosive effects of globalization on both ends of this middle stratum. Second, we must understand and respond to the ways that globalization undermines traditional regulatory approaches to environmental protection. Power in global production systems has shifted both upstream and downstream from the factory floor, where environmental efforts traditionally have focused. Viewing the problem from the consumption angle calls attention to the importance of following economic power “downstream” in global commodity chains, to the ideologies, symbols, relationships and practices that drive consumption.