![]() In this regard, collective action to address climate change is crucial. Their voices are critical to ensuring human rights are placed front and centre of countries’ responses to the crisis. I cannot underscore enough the importance of public participation in climate change policy-making – particularly by those most affected by its impacts. For every day that we delay, it is our children who will suffer the most severe consequences. How future generations live with the effects of climate change depends strongly on the action that we take now. the actions we take to address one crisis can impact or support our ability to address the other. Environmental degradation is putting human rights – including to life, health, a healthy environment, housing, decent work, water, culture, development and self-determination – under profound threat.Įnvironmental degradation increases the risk of animal to human transmission of viruses. The impacts of the COVID-19 crisis are amplified by and interlinked with the climate emergency, an emergency which is upending lives and livelihoods in every corner of the world. Now is a window of opportunity to renew and revitalize human rights funding. Having witnessed first-hand the tangible impacts of philanthropic activities on human rights and dignity around the world, I can only encourage such foundations to urgently reconsider their decisions. This is also where private sector, philanthropic and civil society actors can all commit to working together in a more collaborative and effective way.Īs you know, in the face of many challenges over recent years, several large foundations have reduced or eliminated their human rights programs. Governments have a clear responsibility – they need to amplify their support to COVAX for example, to ensure effective access to vaccines for all countries.īut, dear friends, it is not only Governments who are bound to these obligations. In all countries, hospitalization and deaths keep occurring predominantly among unvaccinated people. These selfish and immoral policies are setting the pandemic’s finish line even further out of sight. Tens of millions of vaccines are expiring unused, and they are not reaching people in low-income countries, who are being sentenced to endure the pandemic’s consequences far longer than those in the developed world. We are no longer faced with production constraints. Nationalism which favours the citizens of wealthy countries to receive life-saving vaccines. Yet at a time when we most require the world to come together and support the most vulnerable, we instead continue to witness waves of nationalism. These are just some of the individuals and groups whose lives have been upended from the pandemic’s consequences. It has also exposed a plethora of inequalities, and most severely impacted the people whose voices have been historically silenced. It has threatened the right of children around the globe to an education. It has slammed shut borders, keeping families apart. It has destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of others. Now in its third year, it has stolen the lives of more than six million people. The COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged the fabrics of societies across the globe. And while we discuss and debate, it is critical that we recall that the most powerful tool we own to address global crisis - and recover from it - is human rights. It is more urgent than ever before that discussions like today’s take place. The world is no longer simply at a crossroads – it is at a tipping point.īut for this long list of interminable crises, the common denominator is clear: human rights can help us emerge from all of them. In Ethiopia, we are witnessing severe and wide-scale human rights violations linked to conflict in the north of the country. One-third of Afghans face emergency or crisis levels of food security. In Myanmar, military and security forces have killed at least 1,600 people in the last year alone. Millions live without proper access to food, water or healthcare due to Yemen’s seven-year war. The people of Syria have been under bombardment for over a decade. In the last six weeks, since the Russian armed attack began in Ukraine, 1,417 men, women and children have been killed and more than ten million have been forced to flee. Inequalities standing at record levels.Īmidst this, war and conflict rages in many countries, pushing millions from the safety of their homes and putting dignity and human life at grave risk. A climate emergency threatening our very survival. Today, the world faces an array of intersecting crises that seemingly show no end. Thank you to Hunter College for hosting this vital conference. ![]()
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