A digital collage featuring a blue balance scale against skyscrapers. On one side, a red-tinted person is reading a book, while the other side holds a globe. The background is a green-tinted cityscape with modern buildings.
A woman reads a book in front of the Flame Towers, one of Baku’s landmarks, on the eve of Cop29 (Photo: Getty Images; additional design The Spinoff)

OPINIONSocietyNovember 15, 2024

The climate and human rights crises are indelibly intertwined

A digital collage featuring a blue balance scale against skyscrapers. On one side, a red-tinted person is reading a book, while the other side holds a globe. The background is a green-tinted cityscape with modern buildings.
A woman reads a book in front of the Flame Towers, one of Baku’s landmarks, on the eve of Cop29 (Photo: Getty Images; additional design The Spinoff)

At the Cop29 climate conference, the host country’s president called oil a ‘gift of god’. But for many people all over the world, it is in fact a curse. Maria Armoudian, a senior lecturer in politics and international relations, explains.

In the first week of the United Nations international climate conference (Cop29), the host country’s president, Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev, addressed the conference, calling natural gas a “gift of god”. But for many people all over the world, oil and gas are also a curse, as our oil appetite is creating increasing human rights crises with more to come. Human rights-supporting countries like New Zealand have a duty to respond to the crises.

Indeed, on the same day that the conference began in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, Freedom House, the international NGO, released a report on the country’s ethnic cleansing of indigenous Armenians from their ancestral homelands of Nagorno Karabakh (known as Artsakh to them). At the same time, the petroleum dictatorship bulldozed another of their ancestral cultural heritage monuments. Azerbaijan had already attacked the civilian population with banned munitions, white phosphorus and torture, and ultimately forced them from their historical lands. Its regular human rights violations include charging at least 15 journalists with major criminal offences and jailing political activists and human rights defenders. But the world has turned a blind eye to these human rights violations for one key reason: Azerbaijan’s rich oil and gas reserves. 

Indeed, while countries all promised at last year’s Cop to address climate change by decarbonising away from fossil fuels, they have all ramped up oil production. China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Indonesia, the US, Iran, Australia, Nigeria, Angola and India have all signed the largest licensing agreements to explore and extract oil and gas. Should they go ahead, they would emit the equivalent of 15 billion tonnes of CO2 – nearly twice the US’s and China’s combined 2022 emissions, according to IISD

New Zealand has joined in on these pathways to disaster. In June, the New Zealand government announced it would remove the ban on petroleum exploration beyond offshore Taranaki as part of an amendment to the Crown Minerals Act. It is also seeking greater investments in the petroleum sector in amendments to this act. Nearly all of the thousands of submissions on the proposed amendments opposed the changes, including recommendations from the parliamentary commissioner for the environment that pointed out that “New Zealand’s policy has always been that all countries should do what they can to reduce emissions”.

an oil pump with a threatening black background
Image: Tina Tiller

Scientists have been clear: new oil and gas fields will only exacerbate the crisis that is already costing millions of lives and livelihoods and poised to upend life on this planet. This year, 2024, marks the hottest year on record, for the second year in a row. Already, the warnings from scientists are becoming reality – fierce and frequent storms, floods, fires and droughts are destroying homes and communities. And with the new reality, many homes have become uninsurable. As we have seen (from the storms and floods in our own backyards), New Zealand is not immune to these realities.

With climate change, new and isolated diseases are spreading into areas they had never been before. Dengue fever is just one example, being spread by mosquitoes that are finding previously inhospitable regions welcoming because of global warming. But climate change, alongside land use shifts, will lead to the spread of additional viruses, and scientists have identified some 1,000 that could infect us. 

Is anyone heeding the warning? The UK is. Under the new leadership, it shut down its last coal plant, promised to stop issuing new licences for oil and gas, launched a new state-owned clean energy company, Great British Energy, and is developing ways to retrain those workers to shift their skills. 

New Zealand’s climate change minister Simon Watts is leading a delegation to Baku, providing an opportunity to position New Zealand as a future-focused nation, alongside the UK, which became a free-trade partner in 2023. 

With a focus on financing adaptation and transition to green energy in developing nations, the 2024 Cop offers New Zealand an important role. Given its long history with Pacific nations, which are under threat from sea level rise, New Zealand can, at minimum, support these low-lying coastal nations in the Alliance of Small Island States by leading in this transition and facilitating resilience across the Pacific. 

But it also needs to heed the realities and mitigate its own emissions as well, which are among the highest per capita emissions in the world. Because most of these come from agriculture and energy (such as road transport and electricity production),  New Zealand can simultaneously secure the country’s long-term future and reduce its own contributions to the climate crisis: working with farmers, our government can target lower-emission crops that can assure affordable, accessible food for New Zealand and our overseas customers. It can also take the lead in developing climate-friendly technologies and industries that advance our well-being and our economy and green our transportation, energy and urban designs.

These efforts promote health alongside reducing emissions. Cleaner transportation systems reduce illness-causing pollutants (such as PM2.5 and NO2) and greening surroundings with native forests and wetlands supports biodiversity, carbon absorption and human health, cleaning the air and water. Expanding our fledgling circular economy will diffuse the need for landfills, another source of methane gas and groundwater pollution.  

While there is plenty of existing knowledge and technology already available to reduce emissions, the political will is often the missing piece. But governments have moral, and increasingly legal, obligations to act on climate change. Indeed, just this year, in an unprecedented ruling, the European Court of Human Rights decided that Switzerland’s climate mitigation policy violates human rights. As a step toward legally tying human rights and climate change, this binding decision will reverberate.  And rightfully so – the climate and human rights are indelibly intertwined, here in New Zealand and abroad. New Zealand, which is internationally respected for its human rights policies, can take action that acknowledges this.

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