Last Thursday, during the state visit of Francois Hollande, President of France, I was invited to speak at the civil society climate change forum that he hosted. In that forum, I share three points. First, I highlighted the connections between human rights and climate change. Second, I suggested how ethics must guide us in the way we respond to climate change. Third, and finally, I proposed that human rights and ethics be integrated into the Paris Agreement on climate change by institutionalizing climate justice.
To elaborate on the link between climate change and human rights, I borrowed the words of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres, a good friend from many years of working together on climate change and who was also here in Manila with President Hollande. A few weeks ago, in Geneva, Switzerland, during a dinner convened by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and the Mary Robinson Foundation, she was emphatic about how human rights and climate change are connected. The connection is intimate, direct and inherent.
What is at stake in the climate change negotiations is not the fate of emissions or billions of euros or dollars. What are at stake are real lives. What we will decide in Paris in 2015 – as what we did in New York in 1992 when we adopted the UNFCCC without binding mitigation commitments by developed counties; as what we did in Kyoto in 1997 with the low ambition of the reduction pledges made there and the exclusion of high emitting developing countries from mitigation obligations; as what we did in Copenhagen in 2009 when our failure led to a lost decade for vigorous climate action – what we will do in Paris can mean life or death, prosperity or poverty, health or sickness, and above all hope or despair not for states or countries but for real individuals, families, communities and whole peoples.
President Hollande and his party, which includes several government ministers and French artists Marion Cotillard and Melanie Laurent, United Nations Environmental Program Director General Achim Steiner, Patriarch Bartholomew I, and others went to Guiuan, Eastern Samar yesterday. They saw a ground zero area of Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan, and they would have seen what is at stake in the negotiations they will host in Paris in December.
The worse outcomes will happen if, in Paris, we fail to adopt the most ambitious mitigation and adaptation goals possible, if we don’t back up these goals with right levels of finance and strong technology cooperation initiatives, and if we also fail to respect peoples’ rights when countries implement our mitigation and adaptation programs.
As to ethics, borrowing from French philosophy, I applied to climate change Paul Ricoeur’s understanding of the neighbor, Emanuel Levinas’ meditations on the face, and Gabriel Marcel’s concept of disponibilite. I pointed out that progress in the climate change negotiations require genuine dialogue unburdened by and untangled from ideological terminologies. What we need is communion with each other that allows us to transcend our national, economic, cultural and other boundaries, what Levinas called our totalities, and instead accept each other in the fullness of our infinity as human beings. And this reverence for the other, for each human being, we are also called to extend to nature and to our planet, of which we should be a friend and not an enemy, a steward and not a master.
Finally, I discussed how human rights and ethics must be the basis of climate justice – an issue that is only emerging as an agenda in the international negotiations. Currently, most of the climate justice discourse is outside the UNFCCC, last year in marches in rallies and in the streets of New York and Lima and for sure this year in Paris. But in the future, I am sure it will at the center of official processes.
In the 1990s, the UNFCCC emphasized the mitigation obligations of developed countries. In the first decade of this century, the 21st, the focus rightly so became adaptation. Hopefully, after Paris, the third phase begins and that is we balance and integrate mitigation and adaptation, this time with all countries exerting their best and most ambitious efforts based on their own circumstances. But even as we do this in the third phase of the climate regime, we need to plant the seeds for the next stage that I believe is climate justice – holding ourselves accountable to those that are harmed by our failures.
In this early moment, human rights and climate justice text in the preamble, principles, and in the manner assessments of mitigation and adaptation contributions will be made are sufficient. But later we would need to elaborate modalities and mechanisms as we did in the REDD+ negotiations that I facilitated for a number of years. We also have the beginnings of that in the loss and damage discussions that many of us hope will be part of the Paris package.
I have been to Paris many times, certainly more than a dozen times in 30 years. But I will never forget the first time, 34 years ago I walked the streets of Paris. It was spring of 1981; in fact it was May 1, 1981, workers’ day. This was a few weeks before the second round of presidential elections that Francoise Mitterrand would eventually win, the first time in generations that a socialist was going to become the president of France. And so on May 1, 1981, here I was, this young activist and myself a socialist, who came from a country that was then ruled by a dictator where we could not even protest, where socialism was a bad name and could get you jailed and even killed, there I was marching in the streets of Paris with fellow socialists, communists who supported Mitterrand, workers, and young people. Victory was in the air. I have to say it was exhilarating.
At the end of that day, I remember telling myself: “Today I understood what Albert Camus, that great French philosopher of solidarity once said: “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.”
That’s my hope this winter when many of us from all over the world, including in the Philippines, arrive in Paris: that we discover in ourselves, all of us who are there, discover an invincible summer that will allow us to see things clearly with light and warmth.
As Christiana Figueres pointed out in her remarks summarizing the Hollande forum: to effectively address climate change, we must all have passion and compassion. I echo that.
In the city of light and of love, in the city where the United Nations in 1948 adopted the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, in the city where the people of France more than 200 years ago overthrew a despotic monarchy and issued the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, lets add one more accolade – Paris, this is the city where the countries and peoples of the world finally turned around and once for all grappled with climate change, stared and wrestled it down together, and begin to overcome it – all of us, all countries and all peoples, in communion and solidarity.
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