7 October 2021 - NPWJ News Digest on Environmental Justice & Human Rights

Articles

Climate change set to worsen resource degradation, conflict, report says
Reuters, 07 Oct 2021

A vicious cycle linking the depletion of natural resources with violent conflict may have gone past the point of no return in parts of the world and is likely to be exacerbated by climate change, a report said on Thursday. Food insecurity, lack of water and the impact of natural disasters, combined with high population growth, are stoking conflict and displacing people in vulnerable areas, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) think-tank said.

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UN Rights Body Should Act to Recognize Right to a Healthy Environment
Human Rights Watch, 06 Oct 2021

When the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet spoke to the UN Human Rights Council at the beginning of its current session, three weeks ago, she told governments: “Addressing the world's triple environmental crisis is a humanitarian imperative, a human rights imperative, a peace-building imperative, and a development imperative.”

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Turkey ratifies Paris climate deal ahead of key summit
Al Jazeera, 06 Oct 2021

Turkey ratified the Paris climate accord on Wednesday, joining the global fight against climate change weeks before the start of a critical summit in Glasgow, Scotland. Though Turkey was among the first countries to sign the Paris Agreement in 2016, it held off ratifying it as it sought to be reclassified as a developing instead of developed country to avoid harsher emission reduction targets and benefit from financial support.

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Decade of climate breakdown saw 14 per cent of coral reefs vanish
UN News, 05 Oct 2021

Between 2009 and 2018, the continuous rise in sea temperature cost the world 14 per cent of its coral reefs – that’s more than the size of Australia’s reefs combined – a UN-backed report revealed on Tuesday. It revealed that almost invariably, sharp declines in coral cover, correspond with rapid increases in sea surface temperatures, indicating their vulnerability to temperature spikes, and found that this phenomenon is likely to increase as the planet continues to warm.

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Ayoreo appeal to Inter-American Commission to save their forest from destruction
Survival International, 05 Oct 2021

Indigenous people living in a South American forest with one of the world’s highest rates of deforestation have appealed to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to save it from total destruction. Their uncontacted relatives are fleeing from one corner of the remaining forest to another, seeking refuge from ever-present bulldozers.

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Historical climate emissions reveal responsibility of big polluting nations
The Guardian, 05 Oct 2021

Analysis of the total carbon dioxide emissions of countries since 1850 has revealed the nations with the greatest historical responsibility for the climate emergency. But six of the top 10 have yet to make ambitious new pledges to cut their emissions before the crucial UN Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow in November.

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California Oil Spill Closes Beaches and Renews Call for Drilling Ban
The New York Times, 04 Oct 2021

A pipeline transporting oil from offshore platforms spilled at least 126,000 gallons of oil in Southern California, the state’s largest such leak since 2015. Dead fish and birds washed ashore in some places over the weekend as clean-up crews raced to try to contain the spill, which resulted from a failure in a 17.5-mile pipeline three miles off Newport Beach, officials said.

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Oil spills plague Venezuelan coast, but cleanup efforts are lacking: Report
Mongabay, 04 Oct 2021

It’s not unusual to see some rivers running black in Venezuela, or for fishermen to return home scraping dark sludge off their boots. Crumbling infrastructure and a lack of government oversight in the petroleum-rich country have made oil spills an endemic problem along the coast, according to a report published this month by the Venezuelan Observatory for Political Ecology.

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