A/HRC/41/39 I. Introduction1 1. There is no shortage of alarm bells ringing over climate change, but they seem to have remained largely unheard so far. In accepting the 2018 Nobel Prize for Economics, William Nordhaus described climate change as a “Colossus that threatens our world” and the “ultimate challenge for economics”. 2 The 2001 winner of the same prize, Joseph Stiglitz, referred to it more recently as the third world war. 3 Pope Francis has declared a global climate emergency, and warned that failure to take urgent action would be “a brutal act of injustice toward the poor and future generations”.4 Climate change threatens truly catastrophic consequences across much of the globe and the human rights of vast numbers of people will be among the casualties. By far the greatest burden will fall on those in poverty, but they will by no means be the only victims. To date, most human rights bodies have barely begun to grapple with what climate change portends for human rights. However, as a full-blown crisis bears down on the world, “business as usual” is a response that invites disaster. 2. The present report focuses on the impact of climate change on human rights and especially the rights of people living in or near poverty; the response so far by the human rights community and its reluctance to engage robustly with climate change; and the necessary response to this existential challenge. It contends that genuinely transformative change is needed both in the ways societies and economies are currently structured and in the human rights regime. II. The scale of the challenge 3. David Wallace-Wells began The Uninhabitable Earth by observing that global warming “is worse, much worse, than you think”. Carbon is being added to the atmosphere 100 times faster than at any point in pre-industrial human history and more damage has been done in the three decades since the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988 than in the whole of human history up to that time. 5 4. The last five years have been the hottest in the modern record6 and global carbon dioxide emissions began rising again in 2017 after three years of levelling off. 7 World energy consumption is projected to grow 28 per cent between 2015 and 2040. 8 The consequences today are attested to by record temperatures, rapidly melting icecaps, unprecedented wildfires, frequent so-called “thousand year” floods and devastating, more frequent hurricanes.9 Millions face malnutrition due to devastating drought and many more will have to choose between starvation and migration. 10 Rising ocean temperatures are killing marine ecosystems that support food systems for hundreds of millions of people 11 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 2 The Special Rapporteur is grateful for the superb research and analysis undertaken by Bassam Khawaja and Rebecca Riddell for the present report. William Nordhaus, “Climate change: the ultimate challenge for economics”, American Economic Review, vol. 109, No. 6 (2019). Joseph Stiglitz, “The climate crisis is our third world war. It needs a bold response”, The Guardian, 4 June 2019. “Pope Francis declares ‘climate emergency’ and urges action”, The Guardian, 14 June 2019. David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth (London, Allen Lane, 2019). See National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), “2018 fourth warmest year in continued warming trend, according to NASA, NOAA”, 6 February 2019. See United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Emissions Gap Report 2018, p. xiv. See US Energy Information Administration, “EIA projects 28% increase in world energy use by 2040”, 14 September 2017. See Jason Samenow, “It was 84 degrees near the Arctic Ocean this weekend as carbon dioxide hit its highest level in human history”, Washington Post, 14 May 2019. Oxfam, “How climate change is helping fuel a massive hunger crisis in East Africa”, 27 April 2017. See Lijing Cheng and others, “How fast are the oceans warming?” Science, vol. 363 (January 2019).