General information

Millions of people are already suffering the catastrophic effects of natural disasters greatly intensified by climate change, from prolonged droughts in subequatorial Africa to devastating tropical storms sweeping across Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. During the summer months of 2018 in the northern hemisphere, millions of people from the Arctic Circle to Greece, Japan, Pakistan, and the United States suffered horrific heat waves and wildfires that killed hundreds of people.

When we talk about climate change, we most often refer to its impact on nature, but the urgent problem of human rights is its catastrophic consequences, from which humanity is already suffering and will suffer in the future. It will exacerbate and magnify the inequalities that already exist. And its consequences will only intensify and worsen over time, leaving this and future generations in ruins. That is why the failure of governments to take effective action on climate change in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence may well be the largest human rights violation in history, affecting generations to come.

What is climate change?

Our planet’s climate has been constantly changing throughout the earth’s geological history, and these changes have been accompanied by significant fluctuations in global average temperatures.

However, warming is happening much faster now than at any time in the past. It has become clear that human activity has been the main cause of warming in the last century – heat-trapping gases, also called greenhouse gases, are released into the earth’s atmosphere while producing the energy needed for our modern lives. We do this by burning fossil fuels, farming, land use, and other activities that lead to climate change. Concentrations of greenhouse gases are now at their highest level in 800,000 years. This rapid increase is a problem because the climate is changing too fast for living organisms to adapt to it.

Climate change is expressed not only in rising temperatures, but also in extreme weather events, rising sea levels, shifts in wildlife populations and habitats, and a variety of other events.

What led to climate change?

We are people who want the same things as all other people – a safe place to live on this planet we call home. And while we still have to remain impartial and objective in our work, we increasingly have to reach out to the public to communicate not only that climate change is real and people are responsible for it, but that its impact is serious and we need to act now.

Catherine Hayhoe, climate scientist

The scientific community has reached a consensus that global warming is mainly caused by human activities, a conclusion reached by 97% of climate scientists.

One of the main drivers of climate change is the burning of fossil fuels, coal, gas, and oil, which has increased the concentration of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, in our atmosphere. This, combined with other activities, including clearing land for farming, is raising the average temperature of the planet. Basically, scientists are as sure of a link between greenhouse gases and global warming as they are of a link between smoking and lung cancer.

And they have been coming to this conclusion for a long time. The scientific community has been collecting and studying data for decades. Warnings about global warming began appearing in the press as early as the late 1980s.

In 1992, 165 countries signed an international treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Since then, they have met annually (called the “Conference of the Parties” or COP) to develop goals and methods for reducing climate change and adapting to the already obvious effects of this change. To date, 197 countries have signed the UNFCCC.

What are the effects of climate change?

The effects of climate change are already being felt now and will become even more severe in the future. Global warming has reached about 1°C above pre-industrial levels. Every half degree (or even less) of global warming matters.

It is important to remember that no list of the effects of climate change can be exhaustive. It is likely that periods of extreme heat will occur more frequently and last longer, and extreme precipitation will become much more intense and frequent in many regions. The oceans will continue to warm and acidify, and global average sea levels will continue to rise. And all of this together has already begun and will continue to have catastrophic effects on people’s lives.

The urgent need to combat climate change has become even more apparent since the October 2018 publication of a major report by the leading climate change research organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). ICIC experts warn that to avoid catastrophic global warming, temperature increases must not exceed 1.5°C over pre-industrial levels. The report talks about the huge difference between scenarios where warming reaches 1.5°C or 2°C.

ICIC experts believe that to limit global average warming to 1.5°C, we must:

• By 2050, reduce the number of people vulnerable to the risks associated with warming and poverty by several hundred million;
• protect 10 million people from the risks associated with sea level change;
• reduce the number of people vulnerable to increasing water scarcity by 50 percent, or to one in 25 of all people on Earth.

And, perhaps most importantly, the ICIC report gives mankind a clear deadline to avoid a catastrophe: to avoid a 1.5°C temperature rise by 2030, greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced to half of their 2010 level. So our governments have to take immediate measures to change the course of development. The more time we need to do this, the more we will have to rely on expensive technology which can be detrimental to human rights.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called on states to set realistic goals for themselves to curb emissions growth by 2024: “if nothing is changed by 2020, we will miss the moment when unrestrained climate change – with catastrophic consequences for humans and all life – can still be prevented.”