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Last Update: December 26, 2007
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UN Adopts Resolution on Climate Change and Human Rights
April 4, 2008 - The UN Human Rights Council adopted last week, a resolution entitled: “Human Rights and Climate Change”, establishing that “climate change poses an immediate and far-reaching threat to people and communities around the world” and risks impeding the full realization of Human Rights.
The resolution stresses that “the world's poor are especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change, in particular those concentrated in high-risk areas, and also tend to have more limited adaptation capacities”. The resolution also calls special attention to the plight of low lying small island states, and other developing countries with fragile ecosystems.
The resolution calls for the Office of the High Commission on Human Rights alongside other intergovernmental agencies like the IPCC, “to conduct … a detailed analytical study of the relationship between climate change and human rights” to be submitted to its tenth session.
While the relationship between climate change and its impacts to human rights may seem obvious to many, the formal recognition by the UN body that climate change impacts the ability of individuals and communities to realize human rights, can potentially have huge implication in terms of how international development and investment funds get channeled.
Efforts are presently underway in international global climate change negotiations to steer discussions towards the affected rights of developing nations which have done little to cause climate change, but are paying the high price of its global impacts, especially in poor and vulnerable communities.
The present resolution is a product of a number of countries, many of which are some of the more notable victims of climate change, including the Maldives, which have organized dozens of states behind the effort to steer the climate change discussion to address the impacts on victims.
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For the text of the resolution click here
