Climate Justice: Challenge and Opportunity

Abstract

It is a pleasure to return again this evening to the Royal Irish Academy as you hold your final event of the year. As an Honorary Member of this institution, which promotes study and excellence in the sciences, humanities and social sciences, I am very pleased to have been invited to speak on the challenges and opportunities of climate justice. As some of you will know, I have recently come home to Ireland and have created a Foundation, which will have a focus on climate justice.1 It is good to be home, particularly at this difficult time, and to bring some of the experience I have gained as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and for the past eight years as president of Realizing Rights,2 to bear on how Ireland can give leadership on the human rights and humanitarian dimensions of climate change. In Realizing Rights we worked with a range of partners to place human rights at the heart of global policy-making, and to amplify the voices of people impoverished, vulnerable and marginalised, especially in Africa. We emphasised economic and social rights, and we focused principally on development challenges, for example, how to ensure everyone has the right to health and the right to decent work opportunities. We looked at how to strengthen private sector responsibility for human rights, and women's leadership on human rights, peace and security issues. By 2007 we realised that there was a topic that, as an initiative focusing on human rights and development, we could not ignore: climate change. What we began to do was communicate broadly that climate change is arguably the greatest human-rights threat that will face humankind. We also helped to connect human rights and climate change through the concept of climate justice.