Climate Change on International Human Rights Day

This weekend, trade and finance ministers from 32 of the world's richer countries descended on Bali. There's no clearer sign of the direction that the UN climate change convention negotiations are moving in. An estimated 184 million people in Africa alone could be dead from climate change within a few decades. Clearly, it's time to formulate economic policies in keeping with the Earth's environmental limits. Instead, US and European Union trade ministers are in Bali clamoring for poorer countries to lift their tariff barriers on "environmentally friendly" products like wind turbines and hydrogen fuel cells (even though the UNFCCC obligates industrialized countries to undertake technology transfers to enable other countries to develop along a less carbon-intensive path).

In other words, it's business as usual, with the North's same-old trade agenda driving global environmental policy. As Nicola Bullard, senior researcher at Focus on the Global South, a Bangkok-based think tank, said, "The U.S. and the E.U. are trying to profit even after having polluted the world."

We arrived back in New York today, on International Human Rights Day—a particularly good moment to consider that technology transfers, and many other adaptation and mitigation projects being considered this week Bali, are not charitable contributions from the industrialized North. They are in fact human rights obligations. That's because impacts of climate change, such as hunger, homelessness, lack of sanitation and healthcare, displacement, and loss of culture are internationally recognized as human rights violations.

The principle of compensation for victims of pollution is firmly established in international environmental law. So are principles of human rights, like the right to a means of subsistence, the right to property (not only property that you own, but also land that your culture and physical survival depends on), the right to health, the right to culture, and the right to life. All of these rights—enshrined in international instruments like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (signed 59 years ago today), and the International Covenant on Social and Economic Rights—are violated by governments that fail to redress the impacts of climate change.

The global track record on climate change needs dramatic improvement in order to promote human rights. Developed countries, and especially the US, must stop dragging their feet on setting up mandatory carbon emission cuts. But they also need to make sure that the policies they do put in place don't create a whole new set of human rights violations. That's exactly what's happening now with policies like industrial-scale agrofuels, the CDM, and so called "avoided deforestation." Women, in particular, are being harmed in the places where these policies are being put into effect.

We've focused a lot on this gendered dimension of climate change policies in the blog so far. And today, on International Human Rights Day, we want to emphasize that climate change should not be viewed an opportunity to promote free trade, but as a human rights issue. Human rights is the framework that can best protect women and families in the places most effected by climate change and generate solutions to protect us all for the long term.


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