Climate change is a global human rights villain, with its impacts undermining human rights in every country, concludes a recent report by Amnesty International.
Historically focused on acts by despotic regimes, armed conflict, and poverty, the global organization’s 2023 “State of the World’s Human Rights” was its first to scrutinize countries’ track records on upholding the right to a healthy environment, reports Inside Climate News.
“That recognition is part of a larger trend toward the understanding that environmental issues and human rights are entwined—human health, access to food and water, the ability to make a living and have a family, all depend on a healthy environment.”
The report finds that “extreme weather events and slow-onset crises made more likely and more intense by climate change have affected countries at all levels of income, but disproportionately affected lower income ones.” Governments and corporate actors have “failed to tackle these adequately or to prevent acute environmental degradation.”
Published annually, the Amnesty report documents human rights concerns in 155 countries. For 2023, it adds the right to a healthy environment to other types of rights abuses, like those pertaining to economic and social rights, gender justice, racial and ethnic discrimination, and treatment of civilians in armed combat. Marginalized people are disproportionately harmed by these abuses because of “several factors, including the cumulative impact of present and past structural and direct discrimination.”
Industrialized and historically high-emitting countries have “heightened obligations under the legal principle of common but differentiated responsibility” [pdf] to take action and mitigate the impacts of climate change, but have not done enough to phase out fossil fuels, it says. Rather, they have continued to expand fossil fuel infrastructure, leading Amnesty to reinforce calls for wealthy countries to scale up climate financing for lower-income nations.
So far, the US$700 million pledged for loss and damage at the COP28 climate summit “was barely enough to get it up and running,” the report says.
“We want to emphasize that when talking about historical emitters, the onus for behaviour change shouldn’t fall on everyday people,” said Marta Schaaf, Amnesty International’s director of climate, economic and social justice, and corporate accountability program.
“It’s not about middle and working class people paying more in taxes to fund climate finance,” she added. “We need to keep our eyes on corporations and individuals who caused the climate crisis and who can afford to contribute—polluters should pay.”
The Amnesty report also points to rights violations faced by activists: “Indigenous peoples, climate justice activists, and environmental human rights defenders have faced mass arrests and prosecution when engaging in peaceful acts of civil disobedience,” it says. “When protesting, they have, like many other activists, been criminalized or been met with excessive or unnecessary use of force.”
“Defenders working to protect land and the environment faced increased risks in countries including Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico.”
In Canada, “the construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline continued without the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs’ free, prior, and informed consent. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and private security officers intimidated and harassed Wet’suwet’en land defenders.”
The report also chronicles more positive developments.
“Several national and regional courts, including courts in Cyprus and Ireland and the European Court of Human Rights, have recognized the right of groups and individuals to file claims that governments have taken insufficient action to tackle climate change or environmental degradation,” Amnesty adds. “These cases have the potential to hold governments and fossil fuel companies to account for specific harm and to lay the groundwork for further climate change litigation.”
