"Comment: Climate Change. The human rights issue no business can afford to ignore", 1 Feb 2019

[T]he best way that businesses can contribute is by seeing climate change for what it is, a matter of human rights. I believe this firstly because the impacts of climate change demonstrably affect peoples’ human rights. Whether that is peoples’ rights to land when it is being slowly submerged under rising seas, their rights to food when crops are failing due to rising temperatures and droughts or their rights to work when the ecosystem upon which their livelihood depended has disappeared. Taking the full spectrum of human rights into consideration reduces the likelihood of implementing approaches that inadvertently cause or worsen impacts elsewhere. Secondly, a human rights-based approach also benefits from the many other positive principles and norms of the human rights framework. Principles such as the prioritisation of effort based on the risks to people (rather than risks to business), meaningful rightsholder participation at all stages and a commitment to non-discrimination and the redress of unjust distributions of power...Relatively simple measures like forming cross-departmental human rights working groups, aligning existing environmental and social policies and approaches and appointing one person to sit over both areas of your organisation’s strategy can make a big difference. Human rights and climate change are fundamentally interconnected topics so your approach to them should be too...