16/12/2020

These Kids Are Suing European Governments Because Of The Climate Crisis

VICE - Tristan Kennedy

The young climate activists, aged from eight to 21 years old, appear to have judges from the European Court of Human Rights on their side.

L-R: Cláudia Agosthino (21) Martim Agostinho (17) Mariana Agostinho (8) Catarina Mota (20) André Oliveira (12) Sofia Oliveira (15). Photo courtesy of Global Legal Action Network. Background: RAFAEL MARCHANTE / REUTERS.
In June of 2017, wildfires ripped through central Portugal’s Leiria region, killing 66 and injuring hundreds more. Fuelled by an abnormally hot, dry spring, and fanned by winds whipping off the Atlantic, the flames moved so fast that many victims burned to death in their cars as they tried to flee. On one stretch of road, 47 people lost their lives, including families with children as young as four.

For Catarina Mota and her friend Cláudia Agostinho, who had recently celebrated her 18th birthday, it was a “very, very scary” summer. “Our houses were filled with ash from the fire,” Cláudia remembers, as I speak to the pair over Zoom. “Watching the news and seeing all the people that were dying, I think it's something that we can't forget. It was very overwhelming.”

Two hours to the south, in Lisbon, Sofia Oliveira and her younger brother André (who were 12 and nine at the time) were similarly traumatised by what they saw, and felt similarly powerless. Fast-forward three years, however, and the four of them – along with Cláudia’s younger siblings, Martim and Mariana – have just achieved a groundbreaking legal first in the fight against climate change.

Despite the fact the oldest among them is still only 21, and the youngest just eight years old, these six young adults and children are suing the governments of 33 countries, including the UK, in the European Court of Human Rights. Their case is based on the assertion that, by failing to act on climate change, these governments are violating their fundamental right to life.

So far, the judges have been incredibly receptive to their arguments. In October, barely a month after their case was filed, the Court announced they were granting it priority due to the “importance and urgency of the issues raised”. In early December, when the case was officially communicated to the defendant countries, the Strasbourg-based body took the even more unusual step of adding an extra element to the rap sheet. 

The Court’s communication included questions about whether, in failing to make meaningful cuts to emissions, these governments were violating not just Articles Two and Eight of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to life, and the right to family life), but also Article Three, which deals with torture and the prohibition of inhuman treatment.

Gerry Liston and Gearoid O Cuinn. Photo by the author.
For the lawyers working on the kids’ case, this response has been hugely gratifying. I meet Gearóid Ó Cuinn and Gerry Liston on a cold, bright day in Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, where their legal NGO, the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), is based.

When the organisation started, everyone worked pro bono; it’s only recently that it’s been able to employ “five-and-a-half” full-time staff. The pair met Cláudia, Catarina and the other kids through a Portuguese legal researcher who was volunteering for free with them in 2017. Having decided they could build a convincing case, they raised the money to do so through crowdfunding.

To the untrained eye, the idea that government inaction on climate change might violate treaties on torture could seem a stretch. But having immersed himself in the case since 2017, Gerry explains that he’s not surprised by the Court’s response. “I remember being shocked by the evidence myself, and feeling that the judges could only be equally shocked,” he says. 

If greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current trajectory, he explains, these children and young adults could live to see a world in which global average temperatures are four degrees hotter by 2100. “That's a world where, in Portugal, you could have heat waves with daytime temperatures of over 40 degrees, lasting for over 30 days at a time.”

Heatwaves are killers in their own right. According to the World Health Organisation, 166,000 people worldwide died as a direct result of exposure to extreme temperatures between 1998 and 2017. GLAN’s submission to the court points out that even if emissions continue on a lower trajectory, leading to a 2.8 degree increase in average global temperatures by 2100, the news still isn’t positive.

“Thirty times more people would die from extreme heat in western Europe in the final three decades of this century, compared to the first decade of the century,” Gerry says.

Long dry spells would also massively increase the risk of further devastating forest fires within the kids’ lifetimes. “The number of days on which there's an extreme risk of forest fires would quadruple in some parts of the country, rising up to 90 days a year,” says Gerry. “Portugal is one of the most vulnerable parts of Europe to climate change,” and the horrific impacts that the kids have witnessed even in their short lifetimes look set to get immeasurably worse unless “deep and urgent” cuts to emissions are made, he says.

Armed with this evidence, the case for arguing human rights violations becomes obvious. After all, as Gerry explains, “human rights law doesn't just require states to refrain from harming people. Obviously, not torturing people is a very important part of human rights law, but it's also about states proactively protecting people. When you think about it, climate change poses a bigger threat to human life and wellbeing than almost anything else.”

Sofia and Andre Oliveira meet their lawyers, Gearoid and Gerry, in Portugal. Photo courtesy of Global Legal Action Network.
In many ways, says Gearóid, what’s more surprising is that this is the first time climate change has been put before the Strasbourg Court. Some of this has to do with complex questions of admissibility. What makes Gerry’s work unique, the pair explain, is his argument around causation, and his use of a legal principle famously applied in asbestos poisoning cases to show that all of the governments they’re suing bear a responsibility for the impacts of climate change on these Portuguese kids’ lives. 

The court’s reaction so far shows GLAN has also been successful in one of its other key arguments – that, as an international issue, this case should go straight to an international court, rather than taking the usual path through domestic courts first.

“They could've kicked us out for not exhausting domestic remedies,” says Gearóid. But the fact that they haven’t – and instead have fast-tracked the case – suggests there’s a keen appetite among these senior judges to consider the thorny legal issues at stake. “It is worth noting that only 15 percent of cases are communicated, typically,” he says, “and the number of cases that are communicated and given priority is even less than 15 percent – it's round the 7 percent mark.”

If the case has come a long way already, its future passage is potentially even more important. “[Decisions about] the European Convention on Human Rights have a huge effect on the domestic law of these countries,” says Gerry. If they’re successful, governments could be held responsible for breaking not just international law, but their own laws too. As Gearóid explains, “Having a decision from the [Strasbourg] Court would unlock the huge potential of domestic courts in the climate fight.”

The next steps will be hard. It’s a David and Goliath match-up that pitches six kids and what Gearóid himself calls “the underdog of legal NGOs” against the massed legal might of 33 European governments. It will also be expensive. GLAN and the young Portuguese applicants have already launched a second crowdfunding appeal to help cover their legal costs, at Youth4ClimateJustice.org. But for everyone involved, the stakes could not be higher.

As 12-year-old André Oliveira explains, “We just experienced the hottest November in recent history. It is not only in our lifetimes that we are going to be affected – this is affecting our lives now.”

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US To Hold World Climate Summit Early Next Year And Seek To Rejoin Paris Accord

The Guardian - 

Action points for first 100 days of Joe Biden presidency seen as boost to international action currently falling behind

Joe Biden said he would immediately start working with counterparts on climate change mitigation. Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP
The US will hold a climate summit of the world’s major economies early next year, within 100 days of Joe Biden taking office, and seek to rejoin the Paris agreement on the first day of his presidency, in a boost to international climate action.

Leaders from 75 countries met without the US in a virtual Climate Ambition Summit co-hosted by the UN, the UK and France at the weekend, marking the fifth anniversary of the Paris accord.

The absence of the US underlined the need for more countries, including other major economies such as Brazil, Russia and Indonesia, to make fresh commitments on tackling the climate crisis.

Biden said in a statement: “I’ll immediately start working with my counterparts around the world to do all that we possibly can, including by convening the leaders of major economies for a climate summit within my first 100 days in office … We’ll elevate the incredible work cities, states and businesses have been doing to help reduce emissions and build a cleaner future. We’ll listen to and engage closely with the activists, including young people, who have continued to sound the alarm and demand change from those in power.”

He reiterated his pledge to put the US on a path to net zero carbon emissions by 2050, and said the move would be good for the US economy and workers. “We’ll do all of this knowing that we have before us an enormous economic opportunity to create jobs and prosperity at home and export clean American-made products around the world.”

António Guterres, the UN secretary general, said: “It is a very important signal. We look forward to a very active US leadership in climate action from now on as US leadership is absolutely essential. The US is the largest economy in the world, it’s absolutely essential for our goals to be reached.”

Donald Trump, whose withdrawal of the US from the Paris agreement took effect on the day after the US election in November, shunned the Climate Ambition Summit. Countries including Russia, Saudi Arabia and Mexico were excluded as they had failed to commit to climate targets in line with the Paris accord.

Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, had sought to join the summit but his commitments were judged inadequate, and an announcement from Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, of a net zero target just before the summit was derided as lacking credibility.

The Climate Ambition Summit failed to produce a major breakthrough, but more than 70 countries gave further details of plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris agreement goal of limiting temperature rises to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels, with an aspirational 1.5C limit.

Many observers had hoped India might set a net zero emissions target, but its prime minister, Narendra Modi, promised only to “exceed expectations” by the centenary of India’s independence in 2047. China gave some details to its plan to cause emissions to peak before the end of this decade but stopped short of agreeing to curb its planned expansion of coal-fired power.

The UK pledged to stop funding fossil fuel development overseas, and the EU set out its plan to reduce emissions by 55% by 2030, compared with 1990 levels.

Alok Sharma, the UK’s business secretary, who will preside over UN climate talks called Cop26 next year, said much more action was needed. “[People] will ask: have we done enough to put the world on track to limit warming to 1.5C and protect people and nature from the effects of climate change? We must be honest with ourselves – the answer to that is currently no,” he said.

When Biden’s pledge to bring the US to net zero emissions by 2050 is included, countries accounting for more than two-thirds of global emissions are subject to net zero targets around mid-century, including the EU, the UK, Japan and South Korea. China has pledged to meet net zero by 2060, and a large number of smaller developing countries have also embraced the goal.

The task for the next year, before the Cop26 conference in Glasgow next November, will be to encourage all the world’s remaining countries – including oil-dependent economies such as Russia and Saudi Arabia – to sign up to long-term net zero targets, and to ensure that all countries also have detailed plans for cutting emissions within the next decade.

Those detailed national plans, called nationally determined contributions (NDCs), are the bedrock of the Paris agreement, setting out emissions curbs by 2030. Current NDCs, submitted in 2015, would lead to more than 3C of warming, so all countries must submit fresh plans in line with a long-term goal of net zero emissions. The US will be closely watched for its plans.

Nathaniel Keohane, a senior vice-president at the Environmental Defense Fund, said: “The [Climate Ambition] Summit captured and reflected the momentum of recent months, but didn’t push much beyond it. The world is waiting for Biden to bring the US back into the Paris agreement, and will be looking for how ambitious the US is willing to be in its NDC.”

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(AU) Stop Fighting And Start Adapting To Climate Change, Basin Authority Says

The Age - Mike Foley

Public battles between farmers and the environment movement must end, the Commonwealth's water agency says, warning a unified response is needed to tackle the damaging impacts of climate change in the Murray Darling Basin.

A joint study by the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO found the "middle of the road" climate scenario is for a 20 per cent reduction in streamflows across Australia's food bowl, assuming 2 degrees of global warming will be reached by 2060, as forecast by the United Nations.

The Darling River at Louth, Far West NSW. Experts are warning that climate change is expected to cause streamflows to fall, on average, at least 20 per cent across the Murray Darling Basin. Credit: Jenny Evans/Getty Images.
The extent of impacts are unclear due to uncertainty in weather modelling and the complex relationship between rainfall, rising heat and evaporation. The study says there are "plausible" scenarios where streamflows could decline up to 50 per cent.

The climate has already warmed by about 1 degree; over the past 20 years, this has caused an 11 per cent reduction in crucial rains in the southern Murray Darling Basin in winter, the region's wettest season. The Northern Basin's climate is even more variable and gets most of its rainfall in summer, where long term trends remain unclear.

The Murray Darling Basin Authority on Tuesday released its five yearly evaluation of the Basin Plan, which included the CSIRO's climate report and warned five of the hottest years on record occurred in the past seven. The authority's head of strategy, Vicki Woodburn, said "the climate has changed faster than anticipated", which brought "profound new challenges".

The greater the reduction in streamflow, the more detrimental the financial impacts to irrigation industry profits and the surrounding communities, the evaluation said. Under more intense drying scenarios, water prices might exceed a "tipping point" for financial viability of even large agribusinesses, which would create a "a radically different, opportunity based annual irrigation industry".

Reduction in long-term average inflows to the River Murray
Source: Australian government
The Basin Plan was launched in 2013 to help boost the river system's declining health, which had set in after years of excessive water extraction. Farmer groups and irrigation communities have campaigned to limit the volume of water recovery, and argued for changes to the Basin Plan to moderate the financial impacts on water owners.

The authority's chief executive, Phillip Glyde, said farmers, environmental advocates and policymakers needed to co-operate on new technologies and systems to adapt to a drier world, rather than continue public brawls over how much water should be recovered from irrigation under the Basin Plan.

"We've got to talk about adapting to climate change without triggering the debate about changing the water recovery target. Going down that road, you end up with people facing up at 100 paces shooting at each other," Mr Glyde said.

Professor Sue Jackson, of the Australian Rivers Institute at Griffith University, said: "We need to plan for the eventuality we may well see quite drastically reduced inflows that could harm many, if not all, of the economic and social activities and the lives people and communities have built around waterways."

While the overall drying trend is expected to set in over the long term, abnormally wet years are still expected from time to time, albeit less frequently, according to internationally recognised hydrologist Francis Chiew, a CSIRO research leader and a co-author on the climate report.

"We will also see longer and more intense drought," Dr Chiew said.

On Monday, federal Water Minister Keith Pitt announced $35 million in funding for a new water information website, and an expanded monitoring network of cross-border river flows.

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