A/HRC/20/7 surrounding climate change must be integrated into this process. Countries in the Human Rights Council have worked towards including input from the human rights community, and there is now an entry point that was not available prior to the Durban conference. Over the next four years, the international community must ensure that there is a strong human rights-based approach to the climate negotiations preceding the 2015 agreement. 59. For a human rights-based approach to be integrated into the deliberations prior to 2015, other steps must be taken right now. One of the most important steps is increasing coordination between the domestic and international human rights and climate change communities. The issues of “common but differentiated responsibility,” “equity” and the “right to development” must be considered in tandem as a principal topic during future discussions of the international community. A regular forum for discussion of these and other issues is necessary, as this debate still has not taken off in the climate change world. 60. Additionally, the United Nations must enhance coordination through its own existing international mechanisms. Inter-agency cooperation is one aspect of this process. The joint paper being prepared by OHCHR and UNEP is one example of coordination between agencies, but this must become common practice across all organizations. 61. Similarly, human rights and climate change must be integrated at each opportunity throughout the United Nations, including through the Human Rights Council, special forums, the universal periodic review, treaty bodies and special procedures. According to Ms. Robinson, on this last avenue, there seems to be strong support for appointing a Special Rapporteur or Independent Expert on the issue of climate change and human rights. Such a special procedure would need to focus on streamlining and mainstreaming the issue of climate change and human rights as one part of its mandate. Additionally, there is strong support for calling on existing mandate holders to integrate climate change and human rights into their activities and to bring relevant issues before the Council, the General Assembly and the various agencies with which they work. 62. Finally, the international climate change and human rights communities must build on the suggestions put forward during this seminar. Ms. Robinson raised the example of technological innovation that was discussed throughout the seminar in the context of technology transfer. The opportunities here are abundant. The mobile phone, for instance, has drastically changed everyday life over the course of two decades. There are other technologies waiting to be discovered and shared that will change the lives of the 1.4 billion people with no access to electricity, or the 2.7 billion people that cook on coal or other resources that result in serious health issues. III. Conclusions 63. Climate change is a social, economic, environmental and political issue with profound implications for the effective enjoyment of human rights, and its impacts have serious consequences for social justice and gender equality. At the individual level, the effects of climate change will be most acutely felt by those individuals whose rights protections are already precarious due to factors such as age, disability, gender, indigenous status, migrant status, minority status and poverty. Within the global community, least developed countries and small island States, which have contributed the least to global greenhouse gas emissions, will be the worst affected by climate change. Severe weather has immediate impacts that generate enduring alterations to the inhabitability of the planet, while many other effects will develop more slowly into broad, systemic issues. Because the specific human rights impacts arise from differentiated vulnerabilities, a crucial challenge in addressing climate change will be paying adequate attention to the variability of effects. 14