Climate Justice: How Can We Promote and Protect Fundamental Human Rights?

There is a dire need for climate justice for the promotion and protection of fundamental human rights. Can creating an international crime of ecocide be part of the solution to securing our shared future?

Our guest speaker, Nesha Abiraj, will speak about equipping and empowering individuals with the practical and legal tools required for national and worldwide climate justice advocacy.

The climate crisis directly threatens the physical and cultural integrity, as well as the economic functioning, of our world. It is undermining fundamental human rights on a global scale. It is an understood global reality that women and girls are facing the harshest impacts of the climate crisis.

With climbing rates of mass ecological destruction and biodiversity loss, it sets into motion a chain of human rights violations, including but not limited to extreme poverty, increased rates of early, forced, and child marriages, human trafficking, all forms of gender-based violence, including female genital mutilation and cutting, increases in child labor, worsening health, including mental health, an increase in stunting and wasting in children, and forced migration, to name a few. These human rights violations are not new. However, the data is clear: as the climate crisis deepens, the toll on both humanity and nature, upon which our very survival hinges, is only getting worse, which begs the question, where is the justice for the blameless and vulnerable?

States and countries have a very real collective power that can curb the destructive practices exacerbating climate change and human rights violations. This power is at the level of international and national law. A growing global movement across all sectors of society is demanding the creation of a new international crime of "ecocide," making it a crime to threaten severe and either widespread or long-term damage to ecosystems. Emission reductions are only part of the story. If ecosystems, including vital carbon sinks, continue to be destroyed with impunity, the climate crisis will deepen.

However, if enough people, not only those already feeling the impacts of climate change, are able to use their voices and expertise to mobilize their countries to support climate justice at an international and national level, ecocide can be added to the list of international crimes and also implemented on a federal and state level. This will act as a powerful brake on harmful extractive practices and a much-needed incentive for strategic change and innovation.

Thus, together, the people of the world can be a powerful global force for the protection of each other and indeed of all life on Earth.

There will be time for questions from the audience.

Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEscuiqqD4oG9F97cBGCmczPrSxkGWFQgI7

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