Dear Editor
OUR national-level response to the climate crisis is ambivalent. As individuals, we watch each mega-storm with episodic dread, then get on with daily our lives without much thought about the climate, until the next one. As a society we have a similar response: on one hand we make big gestures: create Iwokrama; protect forests under the REDD+programme;and place two million hectares of land under protected areas, but on a daily basis, routinely ignore the consequences of violations of building codes, use of pesticides and garbage disposal.

While most countries appear to operate on a similar stop-start approach to the environmental crisis, there is some indication that a tipping-point has been reached. The unprecedented global demonstrations of the ClimateStrike, along with the UN Climate Summit scheduled to begin on Monday, September 23rd and sustained attention from the major global media networks, will hopefully replace the episodic dread with sustained climate action.

A key to converting episodic dread into sustained attention is a clearer understanding of what has caused the crisis. We are encouraged to believe thoughtless or careless behaviour has got us into this mess — that we weren’t paying attention to the consequences of growing too rich and materialistic. While this is true, the fundamental reason is more structured and calculated.

‘The climate crisis is a network of inter-connected threats to all forms of life rooted in an economic system driven by the aim of removing all legal, regulatory and tax restraints at both national and international levels towards the accumulation of private wealth. Vast areas of the world, particularly in tropical regions, have been ravaged by extractive exploitation and industrialised agriculture which have fuelled mass- migration movements and aggravated social and economic inequalities of all descriptions to the benefit of fewer and fewer people.

Taken together, the climate crisis is an accumulation of discrimination, exploitation and corporate abuse on a grand scale. To this extent, the climate crisis is best appreciated as an accumulation of thousands of specific human rights abuses to health, labour, to clean water, to land that have materialised since ‘globalisation’ got into its stride over the past 50 years. A similar catalogue of abuse of the rights of animals and the natural world can also be sourced to the unrelenting exploitation and toxic poisoning of rivers, forests, mountains, oceans and soils.

The former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, endorsed this analysis when referring to the Sustainable Development Goals “…levels of want, fear, discrimination, exploitation, injustice and environmental folly at all levels are not accidents of nature or the

results of phenomena beyond our control.”
Indeed, the UN development reports frequently and accurately identify private sector environmental accountability as essential to achieving the SDGs, but, unfortunately, does not mention the imperative of ensuring that such corporate accountability is legally binding to institutions of democratic governance. Put more bluntly, private sector corporations must be subject to the rule of law. Neither climate justice, nor development justice can be attained as long as global corporations remain free to use their power to actively undermine a just, sustainable and equitable development model.

It is important that the UN Climate Summit move towards redressing this imbalance and ensure accountability.
Linking the climate crisis to the development process and the range of human rights violations is especially pertinent to the multitudes of peoples worldwide whose lives have been and continue to be devastated by the extractive development model. The Guyana Human Rights Association is calling on the Government of Guyana to use this opportunity of the Climate Summit to press the United Nations to highlight the destructive role of international corporations, which to date has not been sufficiently acknowledged. We further call on the Government of Guyana to ensure that no activity is permitted in our own extractive sectors, particularly mining and petroleum, over which the government is incapable of exercising effective levels of accountability.
Regards
Executive Committee
Guyana Human Rights Association