The triple threats of climate change, pollution, and nature loss are posing the greatest threat to human rights
worldwide, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has warned, calling for greater action.
Speaking at a conference on Monday in Geneva, Michelle Bachelet stressed that global environmental threats are
“directly and severely impacting a broad range of rights, including the right
to adequate food, water, education, housing, health, development, and even life
itself.”
Bachelet continued, explaining that “the interlinked crises of pollution, climate change and biodiversity act as threat
multipliers – amplifying conflicts, tensions and structural inequalities, and
forcing people into increasingly vulnerable situations.” She warned that as
these environmental obstacles intensify, they “will constitute the single
greatest challenge to human rights in our era.”
The UN human rights chief touched on the
freak weather conditions that have scathed every region of the world, stating
that these “extreme” climate events have “potentially forced millions of people
into misery, hunger and displacement.”
Bachelet said that “the greatest
uncertainty about these challenges is what policymakers will do about them,”
adding that “we must set the bar higher – indeed, our common future depends on
it.”
The warning comes just before the UN
General Assembly is set to begin, and echoes the coordination of over 200
health journals publishing the same editorial stressing the “catastrophic harm”
of climate change on health.
Data from the European Union’s Copernicus
Climate Change Service found that summer 2021 was the hottest ever, mentioning
“record-breaking maximum temperatures in Mediterranean countries,
warmer-than-average temperatures in the east, and generally below-average
temperatures in the north.”
Meanwhile in China, heavy flooding in
Sichuan province led to the evacuation of over 80,000 people from their homes
by authorities in August. Record rainfall in July in the central province of
Henan claimed over 300 lives. On the other end of the spectrum in Iran, water
shortages caused by the most severe drought in fifty years prompted a string of
protests in the southern region of Khuzestan in July.
