Climate Change

“Climate change is a reality that now affects every region of the world. The human implications of currently projected levels of global heating are catastrophic. Storms are rising and tides could submerge entire island nations and coastal cities. Fires rage through our forests, and the ice is melting. We are burning up our future – literally.” Michelle Bachelet, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 9 September 2019.

Climate change is already affecting human beings and nature, and is undoubtedly one of the greatest global challenges threatening, with its devastating impact, the environment and the future perpetuation of humankind.
In the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Member States express their commitment to protect the planet from degradation and take urgent action on climate change. The outcome document of the Rio+20 Conference, “The Future We Want”, underscores climate change as “an inevitable and urgent global challenge with long-term implications for the sustainable development of all countries”.

The impact of climate change includes implications for the effective enjoyment of a wide range of fundamental freedoms and human rights, such as, inter alia, the right to life, the right to adequate food, the right to safe drinking water, the right to adequate housing and the right to health. It poses serious threats to the enjoyment of both the right to self-determination and the right to development, exacerbating the existing inequalities among countries and the vulnerabilities of communities and groups, especially children, women, persons with disabilities and indigenous people. Furthermore, another dramatic effect of this phenomenon concerns human mobility. Although the movements within and across national borders have a complex and multicausal nature, there is a clear link between climate change-related effects, environmental disasters and the increasing phenomena of displacement and migration.

As Pope Francis affirmed in his Encyclical “Laudato Sii” climate is a “common good, belonging to all and meant for all.”

APG23 firmly believes that climate change is a collective problem that require collective solutions where cooperation among States become an imperative and a multilateral approach is paramount. States, the international community and the United Nations have to give an urgent and immediate response to climate change.

APG23 urges the full respect and implementation of international agreements, making the so-called “big polluters” be accountable for their violations and for their contribution to the environmental crisis, and advocates political, financial and commercial relations among States aiming to encourage the correction of the existing imbalances. Environmental protection and the fight against global warming must become a political priority in all the countries. Only through an integral approach we can hope to successfully implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with particular attention to Goal 13.