SubscribeClimate Change 911, and a Rights-Based Movement for the Earth
The 17th Conference of the Parties (“COP 17”) to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change recently concluded in Durban, South Africa. This successor to the failed talks in Copenhagen (2009) and Cancún (2010) came on the heels of increasingly dire warnings about the need to act now to avert irreversible and catastrophic impacts to people and the ecosystems that support us. Recent releases include information on the relentless increase in greenhouse gas emissions, new findings on the accelerating rate of climate-caused species extinctions, the potential impacts on the ground in California, and finally the International Energy Agency's conclusion that the world will enter an irreversible climate change spiral within five years without significant action.
Despite these dire warnings, the "success" touted by world leaders at the conclusion of COP 17 was an agreement to reach an agreement that may be implemented by 2020, well after scientists assert that irreversible climate change impacts will begin to take on a life of their own. Swift, decisive action is needed immediately. The purpose of COP 17 (and earlier negotiations) was to make and implement this agreement, not continue to delay it.
This result illustrates even more clearly the need for a different focus. In a landmark 2010 presentation, the head of MIT’s Systems Design and Management department, an active participant in the COP negotiations, detailed the critical need to act decisively, and now, on climate change. He concluded with a call for a rights-based movement for the Earth, similar to the civil rights movement and other rights-based initiatives, as essential to our collective well-being. Advocacy organizations at COP 17 in Durban took up this message with a similar call for rights for the environment to exist, thrive and evolve.
Advocates globally will continue to build the needed rights-based movement for the Earth, a movement that Earth Law Center has been promoting in advance of the once-in-a-generation “Earth Summit” in June 2012 in Rio de Janeiro, or "Rio +20." Read Earth Law Center’s comments to the U.N. calling for adoption in Rio of a platform of Earth rights, and exposing the deep flaws of the U.N. Environment Program’s market-based “solutions” to current environmental crises. Earth Law Center attended the recent U.N. planning meeting for Rio +20 and worked with colleagues there to include in the formal Non-Governmental Organization Statement to the U.N. a call for "the adoption of legal rights for ecosystem to exist, thrive and evolve." The U.N. has just released the initial working document, or "Zero Draft," for Rio +20; this document will be subject to extensive review before the June conference.
Earth Law Center is a “think, share and do” organization dedicated to advancing laws that incorporate the inherent rights of all Earth’s inhabitants and ecosystems to co-exist, thrive and evolve. Watch a video of Earth Law Center and global partners calling for a rights-based movement for the Earth, and a video of Executive Director Linda Sheehan addressing the need for this movement in a recent presentation at Southern Cross University, Australia.