Babies with wrinkled skin, weighing no more than newborns despite being six months to a year old. Whole families walking for a week without water, the children’s feet raw and bloodied. Hunger and disease even in the relative safety and comfort of a refugee camp. Kids, seeking these very camps, lured, instead, into armed groups.

These are some of the scenes currently playing out in the Horn of Africa.

The drought has wrecked damage that’s largely indescribable. The task of providing the affected people with food, water, and shelter is underway (though it’s so far inadequate). Now we have to look at what the consequences of this ongoing event—and others like it—might be.

On July 20, the United Nations Security Council debated the possible link between climate change and security. For many, the relationship is fairly obvious. Though climate change, reductions in food production as a result of shifting weather patterns, and rising rates of extreme weather often won’t directly lead to conflicts, they do make them more likely. It’s a “threat multiplier”. As more climate refugees (people displaced from traditional homelands) try to make their way into regions populated by people who already find themselves on the edge, the chance a conflict over dwindling resources will erupt increases.

Some members of the Security Council correctly approved the idea of expanding its role as the global police force to conflicts caused by climate change. “The security council should join the general assembly in recognising climate change as a threat to international peace and security,” wrote Marcus Stephen, the president of Nauru, in an article in the New York Times. “It is a threat as great as nuclear proliferation or global terrorism.”

A new book written by Christian Parenti, called Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, makes the case, with countless examples, of the human and social toll of climate change. Droughts that lower wheat production and, in turn, raise global food prices, fueling riots and battles between state armies and resistance groups, are only one of the many ways the natural and the social world affect one another.

Interestingly, despite the official foot-dragging of the United States on climate change, U.S. national security agencies, like the CIA with the Center on Climate Change and National Security, takes the connection very seriously. As they should.

And now it’s time the United Nations do the same. Hopefully the permanent members of the Security Council can agree on, and enforce, a document establishing the details of what’s incontestable—that, when conflicts produced by man-made changes in our environment arise, it has a duty to intervene and protect people made vulnerable and defenseless by circumstances outside their control.

Daniel Tseghay works as a director at ACORN Canada.