The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Thursday met to discuss the possible peace and security implications of climate change as countries have failed to forge a consensus on whether the most powerful UN body should be responsible for the issue.

The US, joined by Britain and other Western nations, argues that the council has the obligation to address climate change consequences, such as flooding, drought and famine that threaten global security and peace.

However, the notion was rejected by Russia, China, India and other developing countries in the council. They believe that it would be more appropriate to discuss ways of solving the issue through other means, especially the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, as it includes all member states.

The dispute came as the UNSC formally debated the environment for the first time in four years and followed dire warnings by a senior UN official that global warming was speeding up and bringing unpredictable consequences.

Achim Steiner, head of the UN Environment Program, said earlier that climate change was advancing too fast for attempts to contain it to keep up, due to slow-moving negotiations on greenhouse gas emissions targets and other measures.

Russian envoy Alexander Pankin said Moscow was "skeptical" about attempts to put the implications of climate change on the council's agenda, since its scope is defined as dealing with threats to international peace and security.

Climate change may affect security but it is fundamentally a sustainable development issue, said Wang Min, the deputy permanent representative of China to the UN, noting that the UNSC has neither the required expertise in climate change nor the right means and resources to fight it.

Climate change is undergoing a transition from being a purely environmental issue to becoming part of politics and security, so it is reasonable for the UNSC to play a role in solving the problem, said Zhang Haibin, a professor at the School of International Studies at Peking University, adding that the council's full involvement could bring home the full urgency of the problem to certain countries.

"But the council is definitely not the right body to conduct major negotiations over cli-mate change and make relevant policy decisions," he told the Global Times.

The main responsibility of the UNSC is to address traditional security issues and climate change is not among these, according to Zhang. "It's unlikely that the body will find a way to stop climate change."