Britain is trying to push climate change on to the agenda of the UN Security Council for the first time.

British diplomats have begun lobbying for an unprecedented public debate on the matter when Britain takes over the presidency of the council next month. Items placed on the council’s agenda must represent a threat to international peace and security.

British officials argue that global warming poses a threat to human security, broadly defined, noting that the council has similarly discussed Aids. They contend that people displaced by rising sea levels in lowlying countries such as Bangladesh and the Maldives will seek refuge elsewhere. The British received a boost last week from Ban Ki Moon, the UN SecretaryGeneral, who called climate change as big a threat to mankind as war. In a speech to high-school students, he said: “The danger posed by war to all of humanity, and to our planet, is at least matched by the climate crisis and global warming.”

But the British initiative, which requires unanimous consent from the council’s 15 members, is being met with scepticism by the US and China. “It’s being discussed but it appears to be an issue that is not ripe for the Security Council at this stage,” said Jackie Sanders, a US Ambassador to the UN.

China and other developing countries are suspicious of any extension of Security Council jurisdiction over issues that traditionally fall within the purview of the 192-nation General Assembly.

“The Security Council is not the right forum for that issue,” Liu Zhenmin, the Chinese deputy representative, said. “That would be difficult for the council to have that.” Seeking to allay fears, British officials emphasise that their goal is simply to hold a public debate on global warming.

They underline that Britain is not seeking any Security Council action to force nonsignatories such as the United States and China to sign up to greenhouse-gas emission limits set by the Kyoto Protocol.

The British move is part of a government effort to spur a global response to a looming crisis that it says could displace 200 million people by the middle of the century.

Sir Nicholas Stern, the government economist who published an alarming 700-page report on global warming in October, brought his warning to UN headquarters last month. He told the UN seminar: “I’m much more optimistic than I might have been six or nine months ago about where the world is moving.” Tony Blair is focusing his efforts on the Group of Eight industrialised countries. The G8 nations plan to hold a special meeting on climate change in Berlin in May before leaders gather in Heiligendamm on June 6-8 for their annual summit.

But the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, led by Margaret Beckett, the former Environment Secretary, sees Britain’s month-long presidency of the Security Council in April as an opportunity to raise the issue.

The United States forced Aids on to the Security Council’s agenda in 2000, inviting Al Gore, then the Vice-President, to speak at the top table of international diplomacy about the condition’s impact on Africa.

Signatories of the Kyoto Protocol are due to meet at a UN conference on climate change in Bali in December. But UN member states have rejected calls by Achim Steiner, the head of the UN Environment Programme, and Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, for a summit in New York in September to discuss the next steps after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

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