Conference examines human-rights side of climate change

Vivian Luu in the Daily of the University of Washington: More than 40 legal experts gathered at the UW School of Law last week to look into how future laws and policies could affect victims of climate change. Legal scholars, leaders of non-governmental organizations (NGO) and policy makers convened for “Three Degrees: The Law of Climate Change and Human Rights Conference” to confront the humanitarian crisis that could come hand-in-hand with climate change. The conference aimed to influence policy makers who will attend the U.N. Climate Change Conference later this year in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Conference panelist Alex Steffen is founder of Worldchanging, an online publication about sustainability. He said that although environmental sustainability is a design and engineering problem, there is more to the issue. “Our lack of progress toward sustainability is entirely a political problem,” Steffen said.

…“First, we must educate ourselves about the impacts of climate change,” Robinson said. “Second, countries must take responsibility for their contribution to climate change.” UW atmospheric sciences professor David Battisti said climate change is also a human-rights issue because it could impact half of the world’s population….

A gavel, shot by Avjoska, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License