Berna Namata
24 September 2008
opinion
Kigali — On September 9 this year, Oxfam International, an international agency fighting poverty submitted a report to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which is now reviewing the relationship between international human rights and climate change.
The report titled, "Climate Wrongs and Human Rights," concludes that rich countries, excessive carbon emissions are in violation of the rights of millions of the world's poorest people to :life, security, food, health and shelter.
"Climate change was first seen as a scientific problem, then an economic one. Now it is becoming a matter of international justice," said report author Kate Raworth a senior researcher at Oxfam.
Oxfam says that the current trade-off being made between the economic and human costs of tackling the problem is deeply unethical and risks the world failing to cut emissions to stay below the 2°C warming threshold.
"When vulnerable communities have tried to use human rights law for climate justice, it has thrown up major weaknesses," Raworth said.
"It is extremely difficult for people in poor countries to identify who to sue, how to prove the injury done, or even where to bring their case."
The Oxfam report says that while lawyers should push to have international courts recognize future injury and joint liability for climate-change damage, existing human rights principles are clearly sufficient to guide rich countries' policies to cut their emissions and finance adaptation.
One undisputable fact is that as climate change happens, industrialized countries are responsible for the bulk of carbon-dioxide emissions in the past and presently.
Since 1800's, approximately 80 per cent of the rise in cumulative emissions is attributable to the industrialized countries; at present they are responsible for nearly 50 per cent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, yet the industrialized countries represent only 25 per cent of the world population.
As a consequence, climate change impacts aggravate the living conditions of people up to a point where their basic rights are in jeopardy. It is for this reason that climate change has now turned into a matter of human rights.
For instance Oxfam International projects that future climate change is expected to put close to 50 million more people at risk of hunger by 2020, and an additional 132 million people by 2050.
In Africa, shrinking arable land, shorter growing seasons, and lower crop yields will exacerbate malnutrition. In some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could fall by 50 per cent by 2020.
This violates the right to food, article 11 of the International Climate change poses significant risks to the right to health (violating article 25 of the UDHR which states that 'everyone has the right to a standard adequate for the health and well being of himself and his family').
According to a 2003 joint study by the World Health Organization and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, global warming may already be responsible for more than 160,000 deaths a year from malaria and malnutrition; a number that could double by 2020.
Climate change will have many impacts on human health. It will affect the intensity of a wide range of diseases - vector-borne, water-borne and respiratory.
At a conference on climate change and migration, United Nations, officials said rising sea levels and intense storms, droughts and floods could force scores of people from their homes and off their lands -- some permanently.
"Global warming and extreme weather conditions may have calamitous consequences for the human rights of millions of people," said Kyung-Kang, the U.N. deputy high commissioner for human rights.
"Ultimately climate change may affect the very right to life of various individuals," she said, pointing to threats of hunger, malnutrition, exposure to disease and lost livelihoods, particularly in poor rural areas dependent on fertile soil.
Finally, human rights considerations also call for vigorous measures to facilitate adaptation to unavoidable climate change.
According to the Oxfam report "Litigation is seldom the best way to solve a dispute. That is why we need a strong UN deal in 2009 to cut emissions and support adaptation."
Speaking at the Barbara Ward Memorial Lecture on Climate change and Justice in London in 2006, Mary Robinson, the president and founder of Realizing Rights (an environmental body) called on policy makers to adopt an approach to climate change that is rooted in the International human rights framework.
"We can no longer think of climate change as an issue where we the rich give charity to the poor to help them cope. Rather, this has now become an issue of global injustice that will need a radically different approach. Climate change has already begun to affect the fulfillment of human rights," she added.
"And our shared human rights framework entitles and empowers developing countries and impoverished communities to claim protection of these rights."
Again delegates at the recently concluded Africa Climate Change forum organized by the London School of Economics and the government of Rwanda emphasized the need for an adaptation strategy to control natural disasters as "the best" measure to combat the impact of climate change.
Mary Robinson, who was also one of the delegates, urged African countries to capitalize on carbon credit aid given to them to devise the needed adaptation strategy.
Officiating the forum Rwandan President Paul Kagame advised delegates that the world must stop lamenting and instead pre-occupy themselves with implementing corrective measures.
Notably as part of its efforts in addressing climate change, the government recently announced that Rwanda will be at the frontline of global climate change control advocacy for the adaptation of sustainable climate control. Rwanda is currently among the few countries with an Environmental Law policy.
Conversely despite the general assumption that developing countries are most at risk of climate change, with damage at even low levels of warming and increasing rapidly with rising temperature the bitter consequences resulting from climate change - in particular several decades from now - will spread across the globe, albeit in varying degrees.
Even rich countries in temperate zones will not be in position to shield themselves against adverse impacts, as the 25,000 deaths caused by heat waves in Europe in the summer of 2003 have dramatically shown. As indicated above:
There has been injustice in the world ever since Cain killed his brother Abel. But only since the middle of the 20th century have such ways of holding others cheap been thought to involve contempt for human rights.
The basic dignity of people is to be safeguarded against any form of denigrating power, regardless from whom and where it originates.
Human rights cannot be maintained universally, unless the duty of observing them is shared universally. In the end, it is nothing but the golden rule of ethics that underpins this conclusion, demanding that 'what you do not wish to be done to yourself, do not do to others'.
Therefore in some parts of the world, Africa in particular where people are already living at the edge and continue to see themselves pushed over into disaster, climate effects may trigger an infringement upon economic and social human rights.
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