Climate and Human Rights

 

The Catholic Peace Weekly priest columnist visits the climate crisis that the whole world is working to understand and achieve some unity in the ways to deal with the situation.

As soon as June begins, you can feel the heat wave. The midday temperature exceeds 30 degrees, and the sun feels hot. The media is warning us of this summer's weather being hotter and more humid than usual. Most people accept all of this as a result of climate change caused by environmental destruction that has accumulated over a long period.

Climate change does not simply mean changes in the natural ecosystem due to environmental pollution.  The various problems caused by climate change ultimately lead to human rights issues. This is because many in the world today are affected in their dignity, with their basic rights: to health, and housing, due to climate change.

Human beings too are creatures of this world, enjoying a right to life and happiness, and endowed with unique dignity (Laudato Si ).

The first instance of linking the climate change crisis to substantive rights was the Stockholm Declaration adopted by the United Nations in 1972. This declaration laid the foundation for the interrelationship between the environment and human rights by adding environmental rights to the category of human rights, but it has yet to reach the stage of having a concrete impact.

Later, in 1992, at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to realize sustainable development Stockholm's position was once again stated: "Humans have the right to enjoy a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature."

The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development was signed and adopted by representatives of more than 150 countries as a specific code of conduct for people around the world to follow, 20 years after the Declaration on the Human Environment was announced in Stockholm. The content of this declaration already goes beyond human survival and focuses on quality of life and sustainable growth.

Unlike the Kyoto Protocol (1997), which uniformly set greenhouse gas emissions, the Paris Agreement (2015) takes a more flexible stance, with each country setting its own reduction amount. The developed countries maintain an absolute reduction target,  but developing countries emphasize more active and voluntary cooperation by taking into account the economic situation between countries by adopting goals that encompass the entire economy.

As more and more people are suffering from social inequality in Korea, the severity of the climate crisis and human rights issues are being raised as a result of the climate crisis. Heat waves that recur every year cause hardship not only to neighbors living in places with poor residential environments but also to workers in places with poor working environments.

When agricultural prices soar due to record-breaking rains and floods, the poor are bound to feel an even greater burden on their livelihoods. The lives of the homeless are threatened by the cold wave. According to the European ‘Environmental Health Inequality’ report published in 2019, among people whose lives are affected by phenomena caused by the climate crisis, the risk of death in the lower-income class is five times higher than in the upper-income class.

The hot summer has begun. He's worried about how to get through this heat. We may be concerned about ourselves, but he thinks it is also a time when we must worry about our neighbors, who are having a hard time protecting their right to live a dignified life. He hopes this will be a summer in which we listen more closely to “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor”  so that the problems of the marginalized are not pushed out of sight.