A recent Senate hearing on climate change and human rights received less attention that it should have.

The impacts of climate change threaten not only human rights, but also human security. On July 21, the Senate held a hearing on this important aspect of the climate debate that, frankly, got less attention than it deserves.

As Senator John Kerry stated:

“[C]limate change injects a major new source of chaos, tension, and human insecurity into an already volatile world. It threatens to bring more famine and drought, worse pandemics, more natural disasters, more resource scarcity, and human displacement on a staggering scale. Places only too familiar with the instability, conflict, and resource competition that often create refugees and IDPs, will now confront these same challenges with an ever growing population of EDPs—environmentally displaced people.”

Already, communities from the Arctic to the Pacific Islands are being forced from their homes by rising seas, dwindling water supplies and environmental changes that make traditional livelihoods impossible. For the last year, filmmaker and CLPP friend Jennifer Redfearn has been documenting global warming’s impact on the people of the Cartaret Islands in Papua New Guinea (watch the film trailer for Sun Come Up). For 1000 years, the Cartaret Islanders made their home on a group of small islands no more five feet above sea level. As the sea creeps ever higher due to global warming, the islands are becoming uninhabitable. In 2003, the government began the total evacuation of the islanders, taking them from the isolation and relatively safety of their ancestral home to the war-torn mainland of Papua New Guinea. They are among the world’s first documented climate refugees, grappling with the fundamental question of how they preserve their rights, their dignity and their culture when the land is disappearing beneath their feet.

Similar stories are playing out around the globe, as Arctic villages are undermined by melting permafrost, Caribbean islanders weather ever more severe hurricanes, and communities across Africa grapple with lingering droughts and vanishing water supplies. These communities are on the front lines in the battle against global warming, and they deserve to have their voices heard in the debate over our climate future.


Posted: 07/27/2009