ON SOURCE: GENEVA SOLUTIONS
Climate & Environment Human Rights Council Interview
UN rights expert Elisa Morgera calls out world’s ‘carbon tunnel vision'
Midway between climate talks in Baku and Belém, the UN’s special rapporteur on climate accuses the fossil fuel industry of violating human rights while benefiting from the climate crisis. But as the UN grapples with existential problems of its own, she warns that the call for climate justice has just become more inaudible.
A week after attending this month’s United Nations pre-Cop30 climate talks in Bonn, Elisa Morgera, the Human Rights Council’s expert on climate change, is set to do what decades of climate summits have dodged: name the fossil fuel industry as the one responsible for the climate crisis and call for a ten-year phaseout.The timing couldn’t be more critical. After three Cops hosted by authoritarian petrostates, Brazil – which will host Cop30 in November – has promised a conference open to civil society and that honours environmental defenders, especially Indigenous communities in the Amazon. But the signs do not bode well for the summit in Belém. The US withdrew from UN climate talks, countries have been slow to submit climate plans, and donor support is waning. Meanwhile, Brazil, the world's seventh-largest oil producer, recently joined Opec+, a group of major oil-exporting nations.On 30 June, Morgera, who also teaches environmental law at the University of Strathclyde in the United Kingdom, will present to the UN Human Rights Council, which is currently convening in Geneva, a report calling for the defossilisation of economies. Some of the language would have been redacted by the Trump administration, which has banned so-called “woke” terminology from official documents.
Speaking from Bonn, Elisa Morgera told Geneva Solutions that as global warming flirts with the 1.5°C Paris limit, states have been dragging their feet. “Mitigation must remain ambitious and the priority,” she says.
Geneva Solutions: What do you hope will come as a result of your report to the Human Rights Council, in which you call out “carbon tunnel vision” as responsible for the compounding climate and human rights crisis?
Elisa Morgera: My report clearly indicates the problem with fossil fuel lobbyists and their capture of the process. For that reason, it recommends that unless we see a change at Cop30 to create a clear work stream on fossil fuel phaseout, and to monitor progress, as well as significant measures on conflict of interest, we can't expect that process to make the progress we need. We will need to create a new international space.
What would that proposal involve?
This would be a process, as recommended by the UN secretary general (António Guterres) last year in a report on loss and damage, that would include states and non-state actors – civil society, human rights defenders, academics – to monitor progress to defossilise economies. It’s a space where we could share lessons learned, looking at innovation, particularly from the bottom up, and draw on transformation theories, transitional justice practices, including reconciliation. It would involve listening to the truth about what's happening with climate change and where there's pushback, such as structural, historical injustices preventing progress on defossilising economies, and really nurture meaningful dialogue, even if it may feel like a very difficult geopolitical context at the moment.
To phase out fossil fuels as your report calls for, the race for critical minerals needed for the green transition will intensify, bringing mining in new areas like ocean seabeds. How do you balance the need to develop green energies with the risk of producing other types of violations?
There is an underlying question regarding how our current economic models are unsustainable. We cannot just expect to switch from one energy source to another with an expectation of continued and expanded energy use, and that it will not only contribute to climate change, but also cause even more harm to nature and humans in ways that will both worsen climate change and undermine human resilience to climate change. States have an obligation to look critically at the current demands for energy and the projections for increasing energy demand, and who's benefiting from that energy, and whether activities are harmful to the environment. We then need to rein them in, particularly if they contribute to keeping people without sufficient access or no access at all to energy, and the situation of energy poverty or increased living costs.
Messaging about climate change is also a challenge. Is there not a need to change the way we communicate about the climate crisis?
The problem is the other way round. We have clear evidence from over 60 years of the fossil fuel industry's own attempts to influence public debate, to disinform and misinform on how serious climate change is. The UN, journalists and scientists are always on the back foot, amid decades of complex, well-funded activities that ill-inform the public debate of what is happening. It makes it more difficult for us to communicate. There have also been attacks on climate scientists and journalists, at times making it dangerous to contribute truth-based and science-based information. The invasion of public decision-making spaces and the presence of so many lobbyists from the fossil fuel sector have affected transparent and science-based discussions. We really have to think systemically about how to untangle the decades of disinformation and misinformation.
What does your report say about funding climate action?
Some of the findings in the report to the Human Rights Council are that tax breaks that fossil fuel companies still benefit from, and illicit tax transactions, create a significant amount of income that fuels fossil fuel companies, as opposed to being available as public funding for climate action and the protection of health.
With the UN facing a liquidity crisis due to the funding cuts, is your work being affected?
All special rapporteurs’ work has been affected. Our reports are shorter to save translation and editing costs. That's difficult, particularly when we're trying to present more systemic reasoning and include different areas of science. More importantly, our dialogues with states will be capped to an hour and a half. Last year, my dialogue lasted three and a half hours and was on a much less controversial topic. We will therefore be unable to hear the reactions to our reports from all states. Unfortunately, there's no other place where we'll have that attention. That's a loss for public debate.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which oversees the climate talks, is also being defunded…
Many other agencies, such as the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization, are also being defunded. Every UN agency is really providing the essential evidence for understanding how to take meaningful climate action by taking into account all the dimensions of our human well-being, our access to food, access to water and our health in response to disasters. As citizens, we should still ask our governments to contribute to the UN as they've done in the past and realise that this moment of crisis in multilateralism is going to affect all of us.
Cop30 has been ticketed by Brazil as the Cop of the Amazon. Is the government upholding the rights of Indigenous peoples as the guardians of the rainforest?
Unfortunately, it's quite a paradox, because the idea is very important and symbolic. The Amazon has always been a crucial symbol in the fight against climate change and deforestation. It's a symbol also that recognises Indigenous knowledge systems and science that is more advanced regarding systems thinking toward climate change than other sciences that we have relied on. But the UN special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples reported to Brazil recently about ongoing and new threats that undermine Indigenous human rights.