Oxfam: People to be at heart of climate change policy

In failing to tackle climate change with urgency, rich countries are effectively violating the human rights of millions of the world’s poorest people, according to Oxfam’s latest report, Climate wrongs and human rights.

The report highlights how continued excessive greenhouse-gas emissions primarily from industrialised nations are – with scientific certainty – creating floods, droughts, hurricanes, sea-level rise, and seasonal unpredictability. The result is failed harvests, disappearing islands, destroyed homes, water scarcity, and deepening health crises, which are undermining millions of peoples’ rights to life, security, food, water, health, shelter, and culture.Such rights violations could never truly be remedied in courts of law.

According to the international development NGO, human-rights principles must be put at the heart of international climate-change policy making now, in order to stop this irreversible damage to humanity’s future.

“Within an international community based upon the rule of law and universal values of equality, human rights and dignity, it is surely wrong for small, vulnerable communities to suffer because of the actions of other more powerful resource-rich countries, actions over which they have no control, and little or no protection”, declared President Gayoom, Republic of the Maldives.

“Human rights law is relevant because climate change causes human rights violations. But a human rights lens can also be helpful in approaching and managing climate change” declared Mary Robinson, President, Realising Rights.

Climate change is set to undermine human rights on a massive scale. International human-rights law states that, ‘In no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence.’ But – as the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has documented in detail – rich countries’ continued excessive greenhouse-gas emissions are depriving millions of people of the very water, soil, and land on which they subsist.

Oxfam International believes that realising human rights is essential to lift people out of poverty and injustice. Our staff and local partners work with communities in over 100 countries, and are increasingly witnessing the devastating effects of more frequent and severe climatic events on poor people’s prospects for development. According to the IPCC, climate change could halve yields from rain-fed crops in parts of Africa as early as 2020, and put 50 million more people worldwide at risk of hunger. Almost half a million people today live on islands that are threatened with extinction by sea-level rise. And up to one billion people could face water shortages in Asia by the 2050’s due to melted glaciers. These kinds of impacts, in turn, are likely to lead to mass migration across borders, and increasing conflict over scarce resources.

Click here to download the report

www.oxfam.org.uk