Join CESR during UN General Assembly High-Level Week and New York Climate Week
From devastating heatwaves across Europe to the catastrophic mudslide on the Nepal-Tibet border, recent months have brought the consequences of inadequate action on climate change into ever sharper focus.
At the same time, a debt burdens, unequal tax systems and an international financial architecture that disadvantages Global South countries are restricting governments’ ability to invest in human rights, public services and a just transition.
Against this backdrop, CESR will be in New York for UN General Assembly High-Level Week and New York Climate Week, joining partners and allies for a series of events to push for the economic transformation needed to confront the climate crisis.
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Financing Human Rights, Gender Justice and Sustainable Development
During UN General Assembly High-Level Week, CESR and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) will convene a closed high-level roundtable exploring how countries can expand the fiscal space needed to turn commitments on human rights, gender equality and sustainable development into reality.
The discussion will consider how international cooperation, progressive taxation, debt reform and transformation of the global financial architecture can enable governments to mobilize the resources required to meet their human rights obligations.
At a time when debt servicing and unequal international economic rules are placing severe constraints on public budgets, the roundtable will bring together policymakers, experts and advocates to examine what a fairer and more rights-aligned international financing system could look like.
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Counting the cost: funding a just energy transition
CESR Executive Director Maria Ron Balsera will speak about human rights-based climate finance at “Counting the cost: funding a just energy transition,” part of the INCLO alliance’s Holding the Line: Just Energy Transitions amid Democratic Backsliding series. The discussion will tackle a central question in the transition away from fossil fuels: who pays? It will explore how the resources required for a genuinely just energy transition can be mobilized while protecting rights and tackling, rather than deepening, existing inequalities.
Date: Tuesday, 22 September 2026
Location: Online
Find out more about the series here.
Registration here.
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Translating the Climate Advisory Opinions into Rights-Based Strategy: Launching CESR’s Climate Advisory Playbook
A growing body of international law is strengthening the case for far more ambitious climate action. Landmark advisory opinions from the International Court of Justice and Inter-American Court of Human Rights, alongside other emerging international jurisprudence, have clarified states’ obligations to prevent climate harm and protect human rights.
CESR’s forthcoming Climate Advisory Playbook asks what it will take to turn that legal clarity into political and material change. The Playbook translates these legal developments into practical strategies for advocates and campaigners working across four interconnected fronts: climate finance, fossil fuel phaseout, human rights, and reparations and loss and damage.
The launch will bring together climate, fiscal justice and human rights advocates to explore how these new legal tools can strengthen litigation, policy advocacy and cross-movement organizing.
Date/Time: 25 September 2026, 10:00-12:00 EDT
Location: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, New York Office, 275 Madison Avenue, Suite 2114, New York, NY 10016
Registration: https://bit.ly/3UFHAtv
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Where Climate Finance Gets Stuck: And What It Takes to Get It Moving
CESR Executive Director Maria Ron Balsera will join climate leaders and advocates for this discussion exploring why climate finance continues to fall short, and what it will take to unlock the resources needed for meaningful action.
Hosted by The Sidebar, the conversation will examine where and why finance gets stuck as it moves through international climate funds, philanthropy, governments and private investment, and why so little reaches the communities and projects that need it most.
Date: Thursday, 24 September 2026
Time: 11:00 AM–12:30 PM
Location: The Sidebar, 134 West 29th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10001, USA
Registration here.
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These events come at a moment of growing opportunity for climate justice advocacy. As CESR has demonstrated, jurisprudence linking climate justice and human rights has been building momentum for some time, creating stronger foundations for demands that governments act — and mobilize the resources required to do so. But legal recognition alone will not deliver climate justice. It must be accompanied by profound changes in how economies raise, allocate and redistribute resources, who makes those decisions, and whose interests they serve.
CESR’s recent climate justice series explores what that transformation demands: from building a just transition within a Human Rights Economy and governing critical minerals through a human rights lens, to putting workers at the center of the transition.