This year alone we have seen extreme weather events and slow-onset processes resulting in catastrophic loss and damage (impacts of climate change that cannot be avoided through adaptation and mitigation activities), leading to serious human rights harm all across the world affecting millions of people, for which historical and present responsibility lies with wealthy, highly industrialized countries and powerful corporate actors. Loss and damage is a human rights crisis (more on our analysis here), and States, particularly wealthy and highly industrialized nations, have clear legal obligations to urgently and meaningfully address loss and damage, both in terms of the symptoms and the root causes. Many ESCR-Net members confront climate impacts on the frontlines and forcefully resist the structural drivers thereof. Loss and damage has thus been taken up as a collective ESCR-Net priority for the past three years.

ESCR-Net was privileged to present the collective statement of civil society organizations (CSO) in one of the high-level events. A promising outcome of this advocacy is the initial commitment by some banks to integrate a human rights-based approach in their plans and programs. 

There is no denying that the historical and present responsibility for the climate crisis lies primarily with wealthy, highly industrialized countries and powerful corporate actors. Despite contributing the least to the climate crisis, frontline communities in the Global South are paying the price with the destruction of their territories and the erasure of their cultural heritage.

ESCR-Net members, the Treaty Alliance; the Global Campaign to Reclaim Peoples' Sovereignty, Dismantle Corporate Power and End lmpunity; the Feminists for the Binding Treaty and the Young Friends of the Treaty (YouFT) thank States present and remember them the urgency to advance in the process towards the adoption of the Legally Binding lnstrument.

Advocacy Papers on the Binding Treaty

• Advocacy paper from 2020: 

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