MANILA -- Greenpeace and other environmental advocacy groups in the country are bent on strengthening the landmark human rights case filed in 2015 against 47 energy firms blamed for a big part of the world's greenhouse gas emissions that have led to disastrous climate change.
Some of the world’s most highly-regarded climate change science, policy, research, and legal experts will appear as witnesses in the ongoing hearings by the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) on the responsibility of 47 fossil fuel companies for the global climate crisis.
Among the experts expected to attend the hearings in the Philippines are Climate Accountability Institute co-founder and director Richard Heede, Center for International Environmental Law president and CEO Carroll Muffet, and Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology post-doctoral fellow Geoffrey Supran.
"The climate crisis is a matter of justice," Greenpeace Southeast Asia Executive Director Yeb Saño said in a press briefing on Tuesday.
Saño said the case seeks to exact the giant fuel firms' accountability for climate change and human rights violations that the changing climate has been causing.
That petition is the first of its kind in the world, Greenpeace said.
Greenpeace said this week’s CHR hearings in Metro Manila will further look into “role of companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Suncor, and Repsol in the worsening climate change and its impacts on people’s lives.”
“Nearly two-thirds of carbon dioxide emitted since the 1750s can be traced to the 90 largest fossil fuel and cement producers,” Greenpeace said, citing findings of a 2013 study by Heede.
Those producers include companies the CHR is now investigating, the group said.
Greenpeace campaigner Desiree Dee said the CHR’s hearings on the case can transform worldwide understanding of corporate responsibility.
The CHR’s first hearing was held in March 2018.
Earlier, Greenpeace said 13 Filipino civil society organizations and 18 individuals joined the petition’s filing.
The filing, the goup said, seeks to implore the CHR to use its investigatory, recommendatory, and monitoring powers in examining the carbon majors’ responsibility for human rights violations.
The carbon majors are active in extracting, producing, and selling coal, oil, gas, cement, electric power, and other raw materials, Greenpeace noted.
The fuel companies' respective headquarters are in the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands, Spain, Austria, Canada, Russia, Australia, Japan, Mexico, and South Africa.
There must be justice and accountability, as the Philippines isn’t a major greenhouse gas emitter but is among the countries bearing the brunt of climate change, Saño said.
Environmentalists said climate change is affecting people in a very real way, such as in the Yolanda disaster in the Philippines.
Experts said emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases accumulate and trap heat in the atmosphere, raising global temperature and driving climate change.
The increasing onslaught of extreme weather events like super typhoons and rising sea levels and temperature are climate change’s impacts on the Philippines, they noted.
Climate change's impacts can trigger flooding, landslides, drought, and other occurrences harmful to life, limb, property, and the country’s economy, they said, jeopardizing Filipinos’ right to a balanced and healthful ecology, as well as the right to food, water, and other necessities.
“The science is very clear. We need to abandon fossil fuel use as quickly as possible,” Saño said. (PNA)
