[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are this has aroused your interest. This Reader, with modesty, yet once again sternly, makes a dispassionate call to action to save our planet from despondency and greed. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
—Numbers about the planet do not lie, they rather reveal a betrayal. (Mauricio Herrera Kahn)
| On October 8, 2021, the UN Human Rights Council adopted a historic resolution recognizing, for the first time at the global level, the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. The General Assembly adopted a similar resolution, with overwhelming support in 2022 formally adding its weight to the global fight against climate change and its devastating consequences. |
1. These resolutions have catalyzed widespread interest in the content and consequences of the right to a healthy environment. Although the UN recognition is recent, this is not a new human right (HR) –the right to a healthy environment and associated obligations have deep roots in many indigenous common law systems. The right to a healthy environment has been further crucial to the rise of a “rights turn” in biodiversity litigation, as well as in jurisprudence. The right to a healthy environment is also being harnessed by litigants pursuing climate justice, accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels and halting deforestation. Because of the widely acknowledged gravity of the global environmental crisis*, courts are providing unprecedented priority to the right to a healthy environment.
*: Ecosystem degradation is occurring across all regions. Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse, i.e., facing an irreversible loss of function beyond repair. (Global biodiversity Report UK) For example, do not forget: Since greenhouse gases need no visas, these are global issues by definition. (TNI, Towards a Bandung de los Pueblos)
Yes but, courts or no courts, the economy that destroys nature is winning
2. Wealthy individuals fuel the climate crisis through their investments –even more than through their consumption and lifestyle— mostly unaccountably escaping the repercussions of their acts while those rendered poor are forced to face the effects of pollution, frequent floods and droughts, year-in-year-out. (2026 World Inequality Report)
3. Mind you: The destruction-of-nature issue is viewed through an ideological lens. But how can climate change be ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’? Rationality seems to have gone by the wayside. Ideological decisions are not always logical decisions. (Roberto Savio)
4. And then, there is the sovereignty issue to ponder in the form of a justified question: Should the UN more aggressively and effectively move beyond managing interstate coexistence to address planetary-scale challenges like climate change and pandemics that demand coordinated global action transcending traditional sovereignty frameworks? (Kenneth M. Stokes)
And then there is the ‘Just Transition’…
The global conversation on a just transition has often been reduced to a narrow focus on labor shifts or energy reforms (CESR)
5. A just transition represents an imperative for HR and for economic justice. It necessitates a transformation of the global economy that eliminates, rather than multiplies, the inequalities that have defined the fossil fuel era. The climate crisis has already most severely harmed women, indigenous peoples, rural communities, children, and populations in countries rendered poor. A just transition requires: redistribution of resources, expansion of fiscal space in the countries rendered poor, and the provision of reparations for historical harms. Much of the global debate on just transition currently focuses on technology, labor, or energy-sector reforms. These debates are critical and should not be undermined or underexplored. But what is too often missing from these discussions is a clear understanding of how countries rendered poor can finance a transition that is equitable, HR-aligned and socially transformative.
6. Be warned against dangerous distractions in this domain like: a) blended‑finance schemes that socialize risk and privatize returns, b) loan-heavy climate finance that worsens debt burdens, and c) the ever-expanding role for multilateral development banks without robust HR safeguards. These approaches replicate, and sadly even multiply, the very inequalities a just transition is meant to address.
7. A rights‑based transition must: a) be publicly-financed, b) be governed-by and accountable-to countries rendered poor, and c) be designed to expand the fiscal space for social protection and public services. This necessitates making taxation more progressive and redistributive, so that those with higher incomes, larger fortunes, and greater responsibility for climate damage contribute a greater share. It requires ending perverse incentives, tax breaks and the $7 billion in subsidies that continue to flow to fossil fuel industries while clean energy remains underinvested (even the IMF says so; look at the link).
So far, the Just Transition Mechanism does not live up to its name (CESR)
8. This is why a new roadmap for the Just Transition Mechanism is becoming increasingly urgent. And you cannot really think about what makes things just without talking to the people who are experiencing the injustice. Far too often, workers’ concerns and wellbeing have been pushed to the side in both the discussion and implementation of the energy transition. In the renewable energy sector, work has frequently been characterized by low pay and an active resistance to unionization. When transition finance flows primarily and increasingly through private capital and loan-based mechanisms, it is accompanied by the implicit agenda to deregulate labor rather than strengthen it. Public Services International (PSI) explained that what we are currently witnessing is not an energy transition, but an energy expansion that prioritizes corporate profit and plunder over the planet. Fossil fuel use and emissions continue to rise to record levels, with even optimistic outlooks predicting that usage will not peak before 2030. State enterprises must be reinstated as the primary institutions responsible for implementing the energy transition. (CESR)
Bottom Line
We must educate children to be better members of the board of directors of the planet (James Gleick, Chaos)
–This shitty world is pregnant with another possible world. (E. Galeano)
9. There is no escape but to build more participatory democracies as it is time to meet the existential environmental challenges as a pressing global concern. (Ron Labonte et al) We also need to amplify community-led visions of transition and help build cross‑movement alliances that bring together climate justice, labor rights, feminist economics and all types of HR advocates.
10. For decades, it has been pointed out that the environmental agenda must necessarily go hand in hand with a social agenda, but it has not yet been specified how this link must be made in practice. In my opinion, it cannot simply be a matter of adding a few pat solutions to environmental measures so that those rendered poor will join-in. We need to reverse the order, i.e., take social measures that also have an environmental impact –think, for example, of housing, transportation, education, or childcare. People will never voluntarily give up their small luxuries and comforts while the major polluters (mostly in the North) remain untouched. This cannot be repeated often enough. (Francine Mestrum)
11. Sadly, politicians seldom confront life decisions; they somehow get captured by everyday life in its many spheres so that they fail in making life-saving decisions. [Is it not time that we more proactively call their bluff?]. (David Brooks) In life, we do not have to wait for its different cycles to close to take account of (achievements and) disastrous failures. (Pablo Simonetti)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
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Postscript/Marginalia
–How many boxes of bananas does an agroecological farm produce compared to a large export company? Let us say the former yields 20 boxes per hectare per month, and the latter 60. The latter is considered ‘better’. But it has contaminated entire ecosystems with pesticides that harm human health. And who pays for that damage? If we calculate the externalities of both production models, we see that the agroecological model, which produces less, is actually superior. Yet such metric does not count. The dominant narrative insists that we must be productive and competitive, always accompanied by the argument that the profits of a few benefit the entire country. (Jaime Breilh)
–Donald Trump is leading the United States in a great leap backward. The rest of the world, at least when it comes to climate science, is refusing to take that leap with him–but not forcefully enough. Insiders know better than anyone the vulnerabilities of the US’s power that presents itself as invulnerable. …So?