The Climate Reality Campus Corps, RAWKUS and Warwick Amnesty presented a joint panel on the interaction of climate change and human rights. Our three societies worked together to emphasise the strong links between environment and human rights.
Speakers:
Dr Sam Adelman teaches Legal Theory and Comparative Human Rights. He also is the module convenor for Climate Change and Development.
Claudia Carter is an interdisciplinary researcher in the field of environmental governance. Her research relates to climate change and sustainability. Donnachadh Mc Carthy is an author, broadcaster and journalist on environmental issues. Edward Page is an associate Professor of Political Theory. Ed's research interests cover a range of topics issues in political theory, normative ethics, and international environmental politics.
Dr Sam Adelman – Climate displacement
Climate change is a planet emergency (see James Hansen). If a meteorite was threatening to fall on our planet, everyone would act, yet the threat of climate change is constantly relegated as a lower priority. The election of Donald Trump, who infamously tweeted about climate change being 'a hoax invented by the Chinese' - and whom Sam qualified a 'neo-fascist' -The Paris agreement is obviously laudable and is likely to perpetrate changes, but it is limited in that it is not enforceable unless it is ratified, and the U.S. threatened to ignore it., will not make things easier for an international realisation and action.
Sam's presentation was on climate displacement and the resulting injustices. According to researches, 50 to 200 million people will be displaced by 2050 due to rising sea levels. Many of the countries affected by this issue are developing states ranked among the 'poorest' and are likely to lack the necessary resources to deal with it. Among the small islands in Oceania and in the Caribbean, 44 of them that are known to be endangered, yet the Paris Agreement do not even mention them. In fact, the refugees’ conventions do not differentiate economics and climate change refugees. Unless this changes, developed countries like the U.K. or any European country will be legally able to turn climate change refugees just as they would economics refugees. People forced to migrate will therefore have to do so without any protection from intentional laws.
One solution suggested by Sam is a dedicated convention for Climate displaced people, or a mention of that issue in the Paris Agreement, but Sam it seems unlikely to happen. Sam insisted that this issue was already rooted in the present: some islands have already disappeared, some countries in Oceania have already started to buy lands in Fiji to relocate their population. Some places are becoming inhabitable due to rising temperatures, and 2016 is now the warmest year in recorded history.
Sam concluded with an call for individuals’ action: he pointed out that we should all resist, by engage in civil disobedience, by disregarding political parties which do not have coherent policies to tackle environmental issues, and also by being innovative and creative.
Claudia Carter – Climate Change governance: environmental and social justice?
Claudia started with a rather unexpected question: how do we accelerate rather than address climate change? Progress on climate change mitigation has been painfully slow, and do not fit with the current global economic system.
low level islands (e.g. Comoros Islands, the Maldives…); countries vulnerable to droughts, floods, storms (semi-arid countries such as Ethiopia, Niger, Sudan, Yemen); countries affected by the melting Himalayan ice sheets (e.g. Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Philippines, Indonesia); and artic regions because of melting ice caps. But we can also look a little bit closer to home: climate change impacts our lives here right now, e.g. pollution levels cause high numbers of premature deaths every year. Yet, when asking her students how important they regard climate change to be in planning today, Claudia found that most of them did not think it was a top priority for the present. The places and populations commonly known to be affected by accelerated Climate Change are
Claudia noted that the UK was the first country to set the first legally binding target for reducing GHG (Greenhouse gas) emissions through it Climate Change Act 2008. The goal is to lower emissions by 80% lower than the 1990 levels by 2050 and at least 34% by 2020. So far, the UK managed to respect this target, but it did so by switching from more polluting to less polluting fossil fuels – e.g. carbon to oil. The Paris Agreement have not succeeded yet in pushing actions towards concrete climate change action. It is a good agreement, but useless unless you implement it – so the question is how much more time and evidence do government really need to act?
The fact is that, we know, but we are not willing to act. The reason relies in our aspiration of economic growth and our consumption habits. The divide between those who have gained and those who have lost from consumer-driven economic development has widened over time across the globe. We have been distracted to focus on comfort and health rather than see that the actual costs are loss of environmental quality. For instance, the 2016 Living Planet Report fears a 67% decline in wildlife population trend by 2020.
The book ‘Environmental Culture’ by Val Plumwood (2002) sums up the idea that we have normalised the absurd. We all consume way mire than we need, and it is convenient for us to accept the norm. We get used to flooding, breaking records of GHG, loss of wildlife, etc.
Key message:
DON’T WAIT: we have enough evidence and rationale to act on CC.
TAKE RESPONSIBILITY: stop normalising absurdity.
KEEP IT SIMPLE: get yourself ‘sustainability-skilled’
ACT: local to global importance. Vote, engage, care.
Donnachadh Mc Carthy
Though we called this event is about ‘Climate Justice’, the issue is rather about ‘climate injustice’, which will affect not just some remote countries but developed countries as well and future generation. We are all in this together, right now.
Donnachadh’s concern and commitment to environmental issues started long ago, when he first went to the Amazon, and realised the impact of human activities there. The activities of our 'civilisation' led to massive destruction, loss and damages. Millions of people are unfairly affected in the developing world, including in major cities such as Lagos, Mumbai, or the cost of Bangladesh. This is a 'political injustice' on a scale that was never conceived.
To take care of the ‘lungs of our planet’, it is not enough to simply protect rainforest, we need to focus on 'our' consumer lifestyle. You could already notice in this room:
-- We served water in plastic bottles
-- We are using on average 50% more of energy than needed to heat the room.
Donnachadh told us about how he got involved in politics for many years, with the Liberal Democrats. This experience made him realise that help is not likely to come from political parties, since they almost all pressures by lobbies preventing proper policies to be applied.
He therefore decided to change his lifestyle and write books to share his experience. His belief is that people need to know how the political systems are corrupted to avoid deception and come up with concrete solutions. While writing, he came up with the “Prostitute state” thesis, which denounces four pillars of the state:
1. The corruption of democracy;
2. The prostitution of Academia, taken over by the corporate system;
3. Tax heavens, with which all major parties have huge links;
4.The corruption of the media (from newspaper to cinema, under the realm of the corporate system).
We are facing a real crisis, which is not level 2 on 10 but 10 on 10. The fact is we could see not a 1 degree, or 2 degrees, but 7 degrees’ global temperature increase during our children lifetime.
What could be done about that? Donnachadh strongly insisted on a lifestyle change and particularly a consumption habits change (see ‘Question’).
Edward Page – Addressing climate injustice: Loss and damage
Climate change, by damaging the quality of life of populations already suffering from acute vulnerability, will impose serious harm on members of existing and future generations. Populations located in the developing world, due to their heightened physical and socio-economic vulnerability, are most vulnerable to such harm. Some of these harms will occur in the future if they are not prevented, some harms will inevitably arise in the future because they cannot (or will not) be prevented, and some harms have already occurred. Where experiencing such harms (or ‘losses and damages’) goes beyond what is reasonable for an individual or group to bear as part of their ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ to share the burden of addressing climate change, a serious injustice arises.
There are two different forms of loss and damages:
1. The limits on the effectiveness of policies of mitigation and adaptation will lead to populations experiencing great hardship (‘residual harms’).
2. Action to address climate change through mitigation, adaptation, compensation will inevitably lead to some negative impacts on these populations even if they succeed in their primary aim to combat climate change (‘policy harms’).
Policy harms and residual harms share a common unjust origin since although their proximate causes are distinct, their ultimate cause is shared: anthropogenic global climate change. They are both sources of actual and potential injustice when they arise in populations that did little to cause the climate problem, have benefited little from climate changing activities that have enriched other populations, and have little capacity to respond to losses and damages they face as a consequence of climate change.
The costs are of course ‘Economic’ costs, measurable with the enormous amount of damages made to the planet. Yet there are also non economic costs, loss and damages that are not quantifiable, though some studies tried to assign monetary value to individuals’ deaths for instance.
Although climate change will have adverse impacts in all states, those most severely affected by losses and damages arising despite (residual impacts) and because of (policy impacts) the implementation of climate change policies will be populations residing in developing. Why?
1. Socio-economic vulnerability to international economic shocks
2. Poor adaptive and rehabilitative capacity
3. Reliance on eco-system services
4. Geographical vulnerability
This is leading to more problems than solutions:
Political problems: While the UNFCCC has developed policies to policy harms and residual harms, developed states have opposed the emergence of an international mechanism designed to rehabilitate or compensate developing states fully for their experience of adverse loss and damage unless developing states take a greater role in sharing the costs of climate mitigation and adaptation. Meanwhile, developing states – which emphasize their comparatively low historical emissions, extreme vulnerability, and exclusion from much of the economic benefit associated with fossil fuel industrialization - continue to demand that they be compensated for the adverse residual and policy response impacts of climate change before any such role is renegotiated. This is a major source of deadlock in the negotiations….
Normative problems: Due to physical, economic, and political constraints, even the most ambitious & sophisticated international climate change response will not prevent a range of losses and damages befalling vulnerable populations. The question therefore arises… whether, to what extent, and how, should the international community address the loss and damage that arises in the most vulnerable states if not by adopting measures of full compensation and rehabilitation?
In conclusion, what we need is an account that…
... explains how the international community should respond to adverse second-order effects in developed and developing states that is sensitive to unequal distribution of national wealth, historical responsibility for climate change, and benefits created by the economic practices that cause climate change;
... helps us develop a normative account of how the international community should respond to loss and damage arising in poor countries that is embedded in existing philosophical literature on distributive and corrective justice;
... presents a reasonable compromise between duties of repairers and vulnerability of victims.
... explain how we can repair damaged international relationships arising from losses and damages arising in the developing world and avoid damaged relationships arising between developed and developing states due to response measure losses and damages.
QUESTION TIME: Could we achieve a ‘no impact lifestyle?
You can improve so many things you can improve in your lifestyle to reduce your carbon footprint, from…
... The machines you use in your house;
... Your means of transport;
... Your consumption habits: plastic, the clothes you wear (which are cheap because we don’t pay the right persons enough…);
...Your diet: eating responsible (you don’t have to go fully vegetarian, simply reducing your consumption of meat for instance can have a huge impact)
Gandhi said: be the change you want to see in the world. Improving your lifestyle is a process, you can’t do that in one day and you’ll see you can always learn new ways.
