Security Council · Committee 03

Climate & the Middle East

UNSC · 30 delegates · Advanced

Climate Security MENA Water Scarcity P5 Politics

The United Nations Security Council holds primary responsibility under Article 24 of the UN Charter for international peace and security. Its five permanent members wield the veto alongside ten elected members, making it the most powerful — and most gridlocked — body in the UN system, as when Russia vetoed a landmark 2021 climate-security resolution backed by 113 states.

At HTSMUN VI, the Council takes on the intersection of climate change, armed conflict, and human rights across the Middle East and North Africa — home to twelve of the world’s seventeen most water-stressed countries and warming at roughly twice the global rate. Delegates navigate the tension between P5 veto politics, state sovereignty, and the reality that climate-driven water scarcity, food insecurity, and infrastructure collapse are actively fuelling displacement, conflict, and human-rights violations across the region.

Topics

One region. Every fault line.

Across the Middle East and North Africa, climate stress, armed conflict, and human rights collide on the Council’s agenda — and run straight into the politics of the veto.

Topic A

Climate Change as a Catalyst for Security Crises in the Middle East

Climate change acts as a threat multiplier across Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya, accelerating instability into humanitarian collapse. The 2006–2010 Syrian drought displaced 1.5 million people and helped fuel the 2011 civil war; Iraq faces a projected 20-billion-cubic-metre annual water deficit by 2030 driven by upstream dam construction and rising heat; Yemen’s aquifers were failing before its war; and infrastructure neglect turned a 2023 storm in Libya into a dam-collapse catastrophe. Water has been weaponized — from ISIS’s control of the Tabqa Dam to the shutdown of Gaza’s desalination plants. Debate centres on how the UNSC can mandate climate-security integration despite P5 gridlock, what binding transboundary water agreements can hold across the Tigris-Euphrates basin, how to protect water infrastructure during conflict, and how climate finance like the Green Climate Fund can actually reach affected populations.

Sub-questions

  • How can the UNSC mandate climate-security integration into its mandates and missions despite the threat of a P5 veto?
  • What binding transboundary water agreements could hold across the Tigris-Euphrates basin and other contested watersheds?
  • How can water and energy infrastructure be protected from being targeted or weaponized during armed conflict?
  • How can climate finance — through instruments like the Green Climate Fund — actually reach the populations bearing the worst of these crises?

Starter Resources

  • UN Charter, Chapters VI & VII — the Council’s powers to address threats to peace United Nations, 1945
  • S/RES/2417 (Conflict & Hunger) — the Council on conflict-driven food insecurity UNSC, 2018
  • IPCC AR6, WGII (Impacts & Adaptation) — climate exposure across the MENA region IPCC, 2022
Topic B

Topic B

A second topic will be released with this committee’s background guide this fall.

Sub-questions

  • Coming with the background guide.

Starter Resources

  • Coming with the background guide.
Coming this fall Background Guide

Background guide ships this fall.

Written by the chair, the UNSC guide will open with a primer on Council procedure and the veto, then brief the climate-security agenda across the Middle East and North Africa — the conflicts, the contested watersheds, and the law of protecting civilians and infrastructure — plus the position-paper rubric and an annotated reading list.

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