Repurposing the United Nations to Address the Climate Crisis on the Tibetan Plateau

The futures of people along China’s western frontier changed dramatically with the annexation of Xinjiang in 1949 and Tibet in 1950. When Communist China emerged from decades of isolation in the late 1970s and reasserted itself internationally through a strategy of rejuvenation under Xi Jinping, the native cultures that call the Tibetan Plateau home began a long period of subjugation and repression. As wider Central Asia is now threatened by climate change, strategies must be developed to respond to China’s growing influence internationally, regionally, and locally, as regional ecosystems, water storage and reserves, and local livelihoods are increasingly fragile.

The ability of the United Nations to adapt to changing humanitarian, security, human rights, and development conditions at all levels remains a critical challenge, as China has also asserted itself with the bureaucracies of UN agencies, organs, and among member-states around the globe. To respond to climate-related challenges on the Tibetan Plateau, attainable, realistic reforms and strategies must be implemented to repurpose the UN. This policy brief, designed for general practitioners, academics, and civil society organizations, makes three interrelated and interconnected recommendations.

• In the same fashion in which gender equality has been mainstreamed into development programming and human rights, UN agencies must move beyond organizational designs and strategies that involve “siloed” or one-dimensional thinking. Rather, climate change must become part and parcel of the development process from initial inputs to final outcomes.
• As Tibet lacks de jure international legal recognition, climate diplomacy and policy must be led and directed from Central Asian countries. As the region lacks both the capacity and prerequisite climate “champions, the UN must orient itself to empower regional states that are both vulnerable to climate change and that are undergoing carbon-related economic transitions.

To avoid the further securitization of climate policy and nationalist rhetoric surrounding the Tibetan Plateau, civil society organizations require greater capacities to analyze, interpret, and disseminate climate-change related impacts and effectively counter Chinese disinformation.