Why Climate Change is a Human Rights Violation
The rise in sea levels isn’t a coincidence or an act of God – it’s a man-made weapon.
It’s not just about the temperature heating up a few degrees or the polar bears finding new homes – though if you go by media coverage, polar bears are a bigger story than the mass death and displacement of people — largely poor, mostly brown — across the world.
For example: Malawi’s agricultural economy is being gutted right now by one of the worst floods in 50 years, with nearly 200,000 people displaced and homeless. Where is Al Gore? The dozens of celebrities who put on Earth Day concerts? Sometimes it seems like the big names in environmental “activism” are more interested in jumping on a trending issue, not centering the lives of those most impacted by climate violence. And let’s be clear, climate change is violence—it is a force of death, impoverishment, and displacement.
South Asian coastal farmers and fisherfolk are expected to see larger and larger yield losses in the next few decades, due to a combination of melting glaciers, uneven precipitation, and rising oceans. Sea level rise is a type of ‘natural’ weaponry generated through the domination of water and air by specific world powers.
Climate change is the disastrous fallout of the profit-making actions of largely Western-controlled governments and multinational corporations. This fallout is most severely impacting the peoples who had very little direct hand in those actions, or shares of the profits that have come from them. That profit is generated by excessive fossil fuel use and carbon emissions that then produce the climatic consequences that most severely impact poor people. Poor people tend to live in areas with the least protection and direct services, and participate in industries like fishing and farming that are highly climate-vulnerable. Negligence on the part of those governments and corporations towards peoples who have been displaced or further impoverished by climate change is a form of violence. That negligence has included severe underfunding for climate adaptation and mitigation efforts, and relative inaction or slow action on curbing overconsumption.
In 2014, the government of New Zealand Court of Appeal made headlines after it refused a climate refugee appeal made by Ioane Teitiota, a 37 year old man from the South Pacific island of Kiribati. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Kiribati – a nation of over 100,000 people living in about 1.3 million square miles – will be completely underwater by the end of the century and the government is beginning to buy land on the neighboring island of Fiji to prepare.
The New Zealand court cited that Teitiota’s case was a novel appeal but that millions were in the same situation, and that if they were to accept his claim “people who are facing medium-term economic deprivation, or the immediate consequences of natural disasters or warfare … would be entitled to protection under the Refugee Convention.” New Zealand actually refused the claim because it says the displacement Teitiota faces is akin to disasters and war, failing to acknowledge it is directly caused by the environmental harm generated by New Zealand and other first world nations.