One World

The biggest impact the documentary, Too Many Degrees: Human Security and Climate Change and its standalone clips have had thus far had, was a presentation given by OneWorld CEO Belynda Petrie to the UN Security Council.

Petrie was invited to participate in an Africa expert group meeting at the UN Office of the Special Advisor on Africa in December 2009. The purpose of the meeting—“Natural Resources, Climate Change and Conflict in Africa: Protecting Africa’s Natural Resource Base in Support of Durable Peace and Sustainable Development”—was to develop a statement and make recommendations to the UN Security Council and General Assembly on the need to consider climate change a threat to human security in Africa. In doing so, the idea is to get the issue placed firmly on the agendas of these two bodies.

The group initially rejected the need to see explicit reference to climate change in a declaration for consideration by the UN General Assembly and Security Council, the majority of the participants stating at the outset that conflict-related issues in Africa were primarily land- and natural-resource related. Climate change was just a fashionable topic that would soon be a thing of the past, was the attitude. And conflict really only concerned the land that contained a resource rather than the resource itself.

Too Many Degrees contributed to a significant shift in the group’s thinking. It helped raise knowledge and awareness levels and balance discussion around the point that climate change is an exacerbating factor in already stressed situations and conditions, and that it strongly increases the need to proactively deal with conflict resolution, to implement appropriate structures and to address land and resource based issues on the African continent.

As a result, climate change is now integrated into a declaration presented by Petrie to the OSAA and the UN Security Council and General Assembly on behalf of the expert group.

Water, climate change and human security now feature separately in the declaration.