The United Nations General Assembly voted Wednesday to engage the International Court of Justice at The Hague in weighing in on the responsibility of high-emitting countries to engage in actions to address climate change. The resolution was sponsored by Vanuatu, one of the small island states most threatened by global heating and sea level rise. With net zero carbon emissions, Vanuatu is one of the world’s most vulnerable countries; over ¼ of its population will be impacted by rising sea levels.
Over the past 30 years, the tiny nation of Vanuatu has emerged as a leader in advocating for climate justice. In 1991, it was the first nation to call for “loss and damage” to be incorporated within the UNFCCC negotiating text, a proposal that was finally realized last year at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Loss and damage would assist vulnerable nations that are disproportionally impacted by the devastating impacts of climate change.
“The fund is an essential part of building back trust after 30 years of failed acknowledgement of the need for finance specifically allocated to address loss and damage resulting from unmitigated emissions and inadequate adaptation support,” Vanuatu’s lead climate negotiator Christopher Bartlett said. www.aljazeera.com/....
Although the ruling of the International Court of Justice would not be binding, it could be cited in climate change-related court cases around the world, Axios reports.
"Together, you are making history," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, emphasizing that even though non binding, the ruling of the International Court of Justice "would assist the General Assembly, the UN and member states to take the bolder and stronger climate action that our world so desperately needs."
The resolution was co-sponsored by over 130 member states.
Meanwhile, in Switzerland, where temperatures are rapidly rising at a rate higher than the global average, a group of over 2,000 women are headed to court in a case against the government, claiming their human rights are being violated because of Switzerland’s failure to aggressively address climate change. They have battled for six years to have their case heard in court.
On the other side of the pond, NY finalizes list of ‘disadvantaged communities’ first in line for climate change funds, which includes central Brooklyn, the coastline of New York City, and significant sections of the Bronx and northern Manhattan.
“We now have a tangible way to address climate injustices of the past,” added Elizabeth Furth, an Empire State Fellow with the state Department of Labor.
The working group based the final definition on 45 different environmental and socioeconomic data points, like poverty rates, asthma emergency room visits, and projected flooding rates. Unlike the federal criteria for disadvantaged communities, New York’s also takes into account racial demographics, like the percent of Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American residents.
The group also created a separate, broader criteria specifically for state funding for energy programs. For that section of the climate law, the group also included low-income households making at or below 60% of the state’s median income, or those otherwise eligible for certain public benefits like food stamps.
Climate Shorts
The Incredible Disappearing Doomsday (Harpers)
The first signs that the mood was brightening among the corps of reporters called to cover one of the gravest threats humanity has ever faced appeared in the summer of 2021. “Climate change is not a pass/fail course,” Sarah Kaplan wrote in the Washington Post on August 9. “There is no chance that the world will avoid the effects of warming—we’re already experiencing them—but neither is there any point at which we are doomed.” Writing in the Guardian a few days later, Rebecca Solnit highlighted a paragraph from a recent report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that said carbon-dioxide removal technology could theoretically “reverse . . . some aspects of climate change.” Though she admitted this was “a long shot” that would require “heroic effort, unprecedented cooperation, and visionary commitment,” Solnit nevertheless concluded, “It is possible to do. And we know how to do it.”
Ten photographs that made the world wake up to climate change
“When you take a photograph that is in focus, properly exposed, moody and powerful, it creates a visceral reaction,” he says. “It has to be beautiful and engaging, it has to invite you in … and it has to have a conservation message.”
In 2014, Nicklen, along with his wife Cristina Mittermeier, and later joined by Andy Mann (both also award-winning photographers), co-founded the nonprofit organization SeaLegacy, which uses film and photography to raise awareness of climate issues and help protect the planet.
“Photography is one of the most effective and powerful tools we have to tell complex stories, like the story of climate change,” says Mittermeier.
The Slow-Motion Tidal Wave Consuming Our Economy
For climate, we already are seeing a glimpse of what is to come: drought, floods and far more extreme storms than in the recent past. We saw some of the implications over the past year, with supply chains broken because rivers were too dry for shipping and hydroelectric and nuclear power impaired.
For demographics, birthrates are on the decline in the developed countries. China’s population is in decline, for instance, and South Korea just set a mark for the lowest birthrate in the developed world. As with climate change, demographic shifts determine societal ones, like straining the social contract between the working and the aged.
An enormous swathe of the Gulf of Mexico, spanning an area the size of Italy, will be auctioned off for oil and gas drilling on Wednesday morning, in the latest blow to Joe Biden’s increasingly frayed reputation on dealing with the climate crisis.
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In all, 73.3m acres (30m hectares), an area roughly the size of Italy, will be made available to drilling companies, less than a month before the 13th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster. The sale, known as lease 259, has the potential to extract more than 1bn barrels of oil and 4.4tn cubic feet of gas over the next 50 years, according to the US federal government.