An Interview with Mary Robinson
- An Interview with Mary Robinson
Dialogues spoke with Mary Robinson about climate change, gender equality, and the path to a healthier, more equitable world.
Your latest book was on climate justice. What does this term denote? Why do you believe that climate change isn't simply an environmental issue?
I came to climate change from human rights work basically, and I often say publicly it came late to me because, when I served for five years as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, I never really made any really important speech on climate. There was another protocol dealing with it, the Climate Convention, and it was only when I transited after my five years to set up a small NGO called Realizing Rights to work on economic and social work in African countries, because they were the rights that really mattered: ensuring access to food, water, health, education, and shelter. I was also honorary president of Oxfam, and Oxfam completed researched in parts of Africa for their events, and everywhere I heard the phrase just "things were so much worse," and it became clear that we just don't know what to do now, we have no idea what happened. Things had so completely changed, and the change was of course they didn't know when to sow, when to harvest, because of long periods of drought and flash flooding, long flooding and a drought that shouldn't happen at that time of year.
So I realized that climate change was undermining the very human rights that I was wanting to work on and talk to African governments and civil society about. So I began to talk about climate justice before the conference in Copenhagen—that was my first climate conference—and I read about it and became very alarmed. After that I developed a focus entirely on climate justice and established my foundation in 2010.
Basically, I would describe climate justice as the link between human rights, development, and climate change. It recognizes the injustice that climate change has affected disproportionately the poorest countries and the poorest communities—small island states; indigenous peoples; very poor communities in wealthier countries. And they're the ones that have the least responsibility for the greenhouse gas emissions that have got us this far. And so that was also what the "climate justice" term calls for: a just transition [End Page 59] to clean energy, safeguarding the livelihoods of those vulnerable populations so they don't bear the whole burden. That it's a just, fair transition for them as well. And secondly, that the benefits more broadly of clean energy get to the billion people who never switched on to electricity, who have been left behind in that current system, and also the 2.3 billion who cook on dirty cookstoves.
If it is the case that climate change disproportionately affects disadvantaged populations, is it not also the case that these people have substantially less power to change the status quo than states and international organizations? Or do you feel that people at all levels in society do have power to make a difference, as we saw with the recent Youth Climate Strike and other similar popular demonstrations?
The interesting thing about the children going out on strike was that they brought a new dimension to the issue: that of intergenerational injustice. And it's taken schoolchildren to make that really visible—"you are not protecting us"; "we don't think we can have a future"; "what about my children and grandchildren?" Very, very powerful words. You know, our house is burning and all we think about is money. It's a powerful moral message.
As for the first question, obviously the biggest emitters have the most responsibility, and the fossil fuel companies have big responsibility as well as governments, but when I talk to audiences—and I do it a lot, generally around the theme of climate justice—I try to say that everybody in the world should do three things.
First of all, do something to acknowledge that climate change has to be taken personally by everyone at...
