A/HRC/41/39 through the conclusion of a dizzying number of international trade and investment treaties during the same period – ignoring apparent contradictions such as how the travel of goods would affect emissions. The trade and climate regimes advanced simultaneously, but with a vast difference in the weight and enforceability of commitments. For example, while the United States has never made a binding commitment to reduce carbon emissions, it has concluded a plethora of binding international agreements that provide investors with substantive rights and the ability to haul the United States into secretive international arbitration. Globally, policymakers have accepted the need for such treaties but have failed to honour them.75 B. The need for economic transformation 39. States, politicians, and corporations have consistently used bad economic arguments to stall climate action. Various Governments have argued that it would alter markets, threaten economic growth, harm citizens’ way of life, and kill jobs. That is a cynical and short-sighted approach. 40. The vast majority of economic growth, development and poverty reduction since the industrial revolution has depended on the exploitation of natural resources, despite the social and environmental costs. Fossil fuels have driven access to energy, transportation and quality of life improvements. Jobs in many sectors rely on extraction and emissions. 76 Developing countries have watched as wealthier countries grew rich by burning an irresponsible amount of fossil fuels. But that growth is already under threat from the disastrous implications of climate change, dwindling natural resources, changing ecosystems and environmental hazards. 77 Maintaining the current course will not result in continued growth, but is a recipe for long-term economic catastrophe. 41. On its current track, climate change will decimate the global economy. 78 According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, at 2°C of warming, the world would experience socioeconomic losses amounting to 13 per cent of global GDP and $69 trillion of damage.79 Accounting only for the rise in temperature, and not the associated extreme weather events, one study found that unmitigated warming is expected to reduce average global incomes by roughly 23 per cent by 2100 and widen income inequality. 80 In the United States alone, there have been 241 weather and climate disasters since 1980 that have each exceeded $1 billion in damage costs, with a cumulative cost of $1.6 trillion. 81 42. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), 1.2 billion jobs – 40 per cent of global employment – rely on a sustainable and healthy environment. In what many regard as the best-case scenario (1.5°C of warming by 2100), heat stress will reduce global working hours by 2 per cent by 2030 alone – the equivalent of 72 million full-time jobs and most likely this is an underestimate. Pollution and environmental degradation will affect workers’ productivity, health, income and food security. 82 43. Addressing climate change will require a fundamental shift in the global economy and how States have historically sought prosperity, 83 decoupling improvements in economic well-being and poverty reduction from resource depletion, fossil fuel emissions 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 10 Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, p. 76. UN Environment and others, Green Industrial Policy: Concept, Policies, Country Experiences. International Labour Organization (ILO), Greening with Jobs. World Employment Social Outlook 2018, pp. 9 and 17. Ibid., pp. 2, 7 and 27. See Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5ºC, pp. 264 and 453. See also Marshall Burke, W. Matthew Davis and Noah S. Diffenbaugh, “Large potential reduction in economic damages under UN mitigation targets”, Nature, vol. 557 (May 2018). See Marshall Burke, W. Matthew Davis and Noah S. Diffenbaugh, “Global non-linear effect of temperature on economic production”, Nature (November 2015). See Adam B. Smith, “2018’s billion dollar disasters in context”, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 7 February 2019. See ILO, Greening with Jobs. World Employment Social Outlook 2018, pp. 2, 7 and 27. Ibid.