With millions under threat, inaction is unethical

In a world preoccupied with issues of national sovereignty, global security and human rights, it is surprising that the international community remains so ambivalent in the face of a phenomenon - climate change - that threatens to rewrite borders, cause conflicts, and violate individual fundamental rights on a scale at least comparable with the major wars of the 20th century. It is also curious that in a world order built upon concepts of international law, solidarity and justice, the international community sits idly by while the Earth's greatest natural resource - the shared global ecosphere - is being critically undermined by the actions of a few privileged countries at the expense of the underprivileged many.

Oxfam International's groundbreaking report on "Climate Wrongs and Human Rights," published Tuesday, highlights these contradictions and couches them in demands for greater climate justice. The report demonstrates how climate change is violating the rights and freedoms of millions of people around the world, especially in vulnerable countries like the Maldives that bear almost no responsibility for a problem that threatens to consume them. In so doing, the report also responds to a call made this year in a United Nations Human Rights Council Resolution, sponsored by the Maldives, for information on how human rights such as the right to food, the right to water, the right to a culture, the right to housing, the right to work, the right to self-determination and even the right to life itself, are being undermined by climate change in communities around the world.

The Maldives is in a position to realize better than most the malign power of global warming. Our beautiful island nation comprises 1,190 tiny coral islands that stretch like a string of pearls across the Indian Ocean. Yet, the beauty of the Maldives is undermined by our acute vulnerability to climate change. As well as being small, all our islands are very low-lying, meaning that sea-level rise poses an existential threat to our civilization - a civilization that has existed for at least three and a half millennia. The fact that the sea is now perceived as a slowly encroaching threat to the Maldives is a tragic paradox when one considers that throughout our history, the sea and the life that it supports has been the life-blood of the nation. Yet today, rising sea temperatures and increased salination are slowly killing our coral reefs as well as the diverse ecosystems that they support.

For the last 20 years, other leaders of small island nations and I have tried to warn the world about the threat posed by climate change. Yet today, emissions, temperatures and sea levels continue to rise at ever faster rates. Soon we will pass a point of no return, and yet this colonial-style "rush for the ecosphere" shows no sign of abating. World leaders - especially leaders of the rich industrialized nations - appear content to allow countries like the Maldives to disappear beneath the waves, while they continue to make a deeply unethical trade-off between human lives and rights on one hand, and economic growth.

I hope that Oxfam International's new report will help to move the world from this tragic status quo to quick action in order to achieve a better future based upon international and intergenerational solidarity and climate justice.

Source: www.iht.com