Read the session “In case you missed it” notes here.
Key Takeaways
- Climate disasters are detrimental to the well-being of vulnerable states on every level—endangering citizens’ lives and livelihoods, affecting the quality of social and community life, and negatively impacting countries’ economic status and capacity to address national needs.
Climate disasters reverse development gains, wipe out national income, and destroy infrastructure. They leave already indebted states scrambling to rebuild schools and hospitals, roads and social protection systems. And when states lose revenue to repeated climate shocks, their ability to fulfil economic and social rights, and to comply with their obligations around education, healthcare and justice shrinks. The resilience of the state itself is weakened.
- There’s a classic triple obligation of the state that is expected of all states: 1. to respect rights (do no harm); 2. to protect rights (stop others from causing harm); 3. to fulfil rights (create conditions for rights to be enjoyed).
To respect rights, states must do no harm. States must not weaken, for example, environmental regulations that prevent harm, or authorise high emitting activities without safeguards, or adopt regressive measures that worsen climate impacts. To protect rights, the state must stop others from causing harm. States, therefore, should regulate companies who have high emissions, or who engage in deforestation, pollution or extractive activities which cause climate related harm. To fulfil rights, the state must create the condition for rights to be enjoyed by people. The state must take proactive measures such as ensuring robust adaptation measures, ensuring access to climate information, ensuring meaningful participation and effective remedies. Fulfilment means creating the conditions in which rights can be enjoyed in a warming world shaped by climate change.
- Climate change is now understood as a direct threat to the enjoyment of the right to a healthy environment. And states have reinforced human rights obligations to address that interconnectedness of environment and the climate change.
In the Inter-American human rights system, the right to a healthy environment and the connection between a healthy environment and climate change are now treated as deeply interconnected. Through a collective lens, the right to a healthy climate protects the interests of present and future generations of human beings and other species by preserving a climate system that supports their welfare. Through the lens of individual citizens, the right to a healthy climate protects the possibility of each person to live in a climate system free of dangerous anthropogenic interference (harm, pollutants, etc.) by human beings.
- Nature is not merely an object to be regulated for human benefit, but a subject of rights whose integrity must be respected, protected, and restored.
Protecting the rights of nature is a legal duty essential for safeguarding both human rights and, of course, planetary survival. The recognition of the rights of nature matters because it strengthens environmental protection. It provides legal tools to challenge extractive projects that harm the environment. It reframes environmental harm as a rights violation, not just as a regulatory breach.
- Climate injustice in the Caribbean region is deeply gendered. It intensifies violence against women and marginalised communities, increasing the vulnerability of trafficking and exploitation, and deepens existing inequalities.
This connection can be made clearly when examining the ongoing crisis of femicide and gender-based violence in countries like Belize, Guyana and Jamaica. As Caribbean scholar Rhonda Ruddock stated, “when states fail, women are expected to observe crisis privately.” Women become the shock absorbers of economic, environmental, and political collapse. Women manage scarcity inside the home while carrying the emotional and physical burdens that systems refuse (or lack the ability) to address collectively.
- Caribbean children are living the realities of climate injustice daily and it is taking a toll on their overall health and wellbeing. Climate justice, therefore, must also be understood as a children’s rights issue.
Across the Caribbean, rising temperatures are making classrooms unbearable. Prolonged heat exposure affects concentration, emotional well-being, cognitive functioning, and educational outcome, especially for students in under-resourced communities, where schools lack ventilation, reliable electricity, cooling systems, or even access to drinking water.
- A just climate future must also be a just labour future as safe, and climate responsive working spaces are a central right for workers.
Article 23 of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, talks specifically about the right to a healthy and safe work environment. Practically, it means that workers should have access to adequate ventilation, hydration, rest and protection from dangerous environmental conditions. It also means that climate adaptation cannot stop at just infrastructure, it must also include people, their perspectives and their lived realities. Through their project, “Redefining Work,” Trinidad and Tobago-based civil society organisation (CSO) Caribbean Feminists is exploring the connections between workers’ rights and climate justice and by extension, raising the alarm and engaging in advocacy around the injustices being faced by workers because of climate events and impacts.
Their research shows that working-class communities often experience the harshest impacts first. Informal workers frequently lack legal protections. Women, migrant workers, and low-income workers are disproportionately exposed to extremely unsafe conditions, while having the fewest resources to adapt, and the least amount of autonomy and agency to enact change within their workplaces and communities. Yet, many workplaces remain completely climate blind to these lived realities.
In the region, we continue to operate under a labour system that was not designed for escalating heat in the Caribbean or worsening storms. The physical toll that these environmental changes place on many workers’ bodies is yet to be addressed and/or considered by employers in a meaningful way.
- Climate justice requires both local action and international accountability.
Caribbean stakeholders’ reflections revealed the following strong shared sentiments:
- There is a disproportionate burden borne by Caribbean countries despite their minimal contribution to global emissions.
- High-emitting countries and fossil fuel industries have a responsibility to those facing the impacts of climate change more severely.
- There is a need for community-centred adaptation and mitigation measures.
- Greater investment in climate resilience and protection for vulnerable communities is a must.
- Stronger public education and engagement around climate rights is needed.