Skip to Content

CESR calls for intersectional climate justice which is rights-aligned and anti-racist

The Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) responded to the call for submissions by the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance ahead of her report on Climate and Racial Justice. 

In the submission, we focused on reforms to global economic governance and the link between resource generation and the capacity to respond to climate change and its racially disparate impacts.

The submission highlighted four key areas for intervention: 

  1. Demonstrating why combating climate change requires the establishment of a just and equitable economic order drawing on CESR's work on reforms to debt, tax and global economic governance institutions 
  2. Drawing on the Principles for Human Rights in Fiscal Policy, articulating how fiscal justice can be an essential tool for racial justice in the context of climate change 
  3. Stressing the need for intersectional climate justice by highlighting the rights-based economy model as a rights-aligned and decolonial mode of development
  4. Drawing on the recent groundbreaking statement of the CERD, calling for a global economic system built on anti-racist principles which challenges corporate power.