International law needs to develop to keep pace with climate change.
It is creating new legal challenges for countries and communities, including unavoidable climate change-related loss and damage.
The biggest challenge globally is to agree and design a fair and effective new climate change agreement, which will involve tackling issues that have never been tackled before.
Finding solutions should involve exploring new ideas and considering lessons from different areas of law. Transitional justice is one area that may provide lessons and ideas for climate change.
Transitional justice refers to processes and mechanisms used in countries and societies that are trying to make a transition from violent conflict or large-scale human rights abuses to peace and reconciliation.
It includes criminal prosecutions, truth processes, reparations for victims and governance reforms.
There are great differences between most of the climate change-related challenges referred to here and the terrible situations faced by countries and communities that are trying to confront and move forward from conflict and violence, but experience and ideas from transitional justice could help develop responses to climate change, including at the global level.
There are also areas where transitional justice is directly relevant to climate change-related challenges.
For the complete article, please see Responding to Climate Change.
“I want you to panic”. This was the message that 16 year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg gave to the World Economic Forum in Davos on 25 January, and in it she struck right to the intergenerational justice issue at the heart of the sustainability project.
The Hague Declaration on Planetary Security signed in 2017 outlines six action areas that require special attention, necessitating “concrete steps” at both global and local levels.
At COP24, India-based Sheela Patel from SPARC talked to Lou del Bello about how climate change affects people in informal settlements the most – and about strategies to address their special needs.
Climate change has been identified and recognized as a security issue and a threat multiplier by the international community, and climate security is now an integral part of security agendas in key international fora from New York to The Hague and Munich. As 2019 kicks off, action and implementation on climate security take centre stage.