🔎 Finance for Loss and Damage

Establish mechanisms within United Nations institutions such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as well as multilateral or bilateral funds such as the Green Climate Fund that deliver financial support and compensation to frontline communities for climate impacts (loss and damage).

What does this look like?

• Establish a Loss and Damage financing facility within or across UN institutions, which could include the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This facility should be financed by wealthy countries and support developing countries experiencing climate disasters.
  • The guidelines for its establishment should include:
    1. equirements for wealthy, industrialised countries to contribute to this facility annually in line with their fair share of historical emissions.
       • Allocating an adequate percentage of finance governments collect through liability measures taken nationally- including litigation, fines, climate damages fines, and other measures detailed in this roadmap—towards a nation’s contribution to the Loss and Damage financing facility. (See National level actions.)
    2. requirements that funding (whether from the financing facility directly or via national funds) be distributed to and in the control of communities enduring the greatest impacts of climate change.
  • The governance of this facility must:
    • Include strong requirements to protect against the risk for conflicts of interests to unduly influence how the finance is distributed.
    • Centre the representation and decision-making of communities in the Global South, including women, indigenous peoples, youth, and local communities (including peasants, fisherfolks, nomadic and rural peoples).
• Allocate a proportion of multilateral and bilateral funds that finance climate actions to go towards mandatory Loss and Damage funding.
  • Examples of relevant funds include the Green Climate Fund (GCF), Climate Investment Funds (CIF), Global Environment Facility (GEF), and the Adaptation Fund.
  • These funds should be handled accountably, transparently, and should be governed with and by people, not dictated by corporations or the private sector.

🔎 Ecocide as a crime in international law

Advance laws in international jurisprudence to protect the earth by criminalizing acts of ecocide, allowing for legal claims against corporations for breaching these laws and committing acts of ecocide.

What does this look like?

• In relevant international jurisprudence, formally recognize acts of loss, damage, or destruction to ecosystems or the natural world ( or ‘ecocide’) as a crime, as civil society along with the island nations of Vanuatu and Maldives have called for, and as previously proposed in 2010 to the International Law Commission (ILC).
  • The inclusion of Ecocide as a crime in international law prohibits acts of damage and destruction of the Earth and creates a legal duty of care for all inhabitants that have been or are at risk of being significantly harmed due to these acts. The duty of care applies to prevent, prohibit and pre-empt both human-caused Ecocide and natural catastrophes. Where Ecocide occurs as a crime, remedy can be sought through national courts and international legal bodies.
• Ensure that the definition of ecocide addresses not only environmental and climate action crimes, but crimes committed against environmental defenders.
• Acts of ecocide committed by corporations should be punishable, and judged upon their impacts rather than intent alone.
• Formally recognize transnational corporations’ role in driving ecocide, and try them when they are accused of violating these laws.
• Formalize an international process that provides and prioritizes access for Global South countries and frontline communities that are enduring the greatest impacts and where transnational corporations and their subsidiaries are operating to seek compensation, reparations, and justice for the crimes these corporations have committed and are committing.
• Through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and other U.N. institutions, register a formal call for international law to recognize acts of ecocide as a crime.

🔎 Binding treaty on transnational corporations and their global supply chains with regards to human rights

Establish a legally binding instrument, currently under development at the United Nations Human Rights Council, to regulate the activities of transnational corporations and other businesses via international human rights law.

What does this look like?

• Reaffirm and operationalize the primacy of human rights and the rights of nature (see below) over and above international trade and commerce and any associated agreements or treaties.
  • All action taken to protect the rights of nature must reinforce and support the rights of people, local communities (including peasants, fisherfolks, nomadic and rural peoples), indigenous peoples, and collective rights.
• Create national and international legal mechanisms to hold liable and sanction polluting transnational corporations and other businesses and force them to remediate and restore the environments they have polluted, damaged, or adversely impacted, and compensate the affected people.
• Establish direct obligations for transnational corporations to respect human rights and socio-economic rights covering the activities of their subsidiaries, controlled companies and any entity in their global value chain.
  • This should also include the direct obligation to respect all relevant United Nations covenants and conventions, including the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, including fisherfolks.
• Establish a state’s obligation to protect human rights and the rights of the nature in a holistic and harmonious manner. In other words, the protection of rights of nature should support and further ensure the protection of human and collective rights.
• Adopt guidelines that prohibit international economic and international financial institutions from giving money toward or participating in activities that directly or indirectly enable corporations to continue to act with impunity.
  • Prohibit international financial institutions from funding the fossil fuel industry and other polluting industries.
  • Prohibit subsidies from going to the fossil fuel and agribusiness industries.
• Eliminate Investor-State Dispute Settlements (ISDS),which serve as a mechanism for corporations to evade legal responsibility or respect human rights and nature, as well a way to formally condemn states that prioritize to the protection and guarantee of human rights and nature against to the rights of investors.
  • Suspend all trade and investment treaty negotiations.
  • Expand these measures to default on the payment of outstanding debts as a result of ISDS awards.
• Revoke the immunity of international financial institutions such as the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC), following the lead of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ground-breaking decision that such institutions can be held liable for environmental damages, following the claim brought by Indian fishermen.

To understand why these measures are necessary to be able to meaningfully advance liability and to counteract attempts by corporations to avoid liability, read these examples:

• Chevron and Texaco in Ecuador.
• This report with 10 examples of how corporations have hijacked justice through Investor-State Dispute Settlements (ISDS).

Several jurisdictions have begun to develop versions of regimes that enshrine the rights of nature, including Ecuador, Bolivia, New Zealand, India. Not all of these regimes take nature as a whole to be a juridical person; in some cases, parts of nature—for example, a river or a species—are granted personhood or are otherwise equipped to litigate their own rights. Additionally, not all have adequate measures to ensure that protecting the rights of nature serves to reinforce the protection of human rights, which is essential. See here for more information on the measures advanced in these countries.

🔎 Fossil fuel non-proliferation

Establish and utilize international mechanisms such as a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty, via new or existing regimes, to end the proliferation and use of fossil fuels, hold the industry liable for its abuses, and use liability to help fund a just transition centred on real climate solutions.

What does this look like?

There are a variety of possible avenues for establishing international mechanisms to stop fossil fuel proliferation. Regardless of the forum and process, such mechanisms should:

• Base these efforts on clear equity principles, and new forms of international cooperation, building on the experience of other international regimes such as the nuclear non-proliferation regime.
• Use funds garnered through liability measures to help finance such a transition.
• End all new exploration and production of coal, oil and gas, effectively immediately.
• Reject polluting industry schemes like carbon markets, geo-engineering and BECCs on the basis that they are risky, unproven, inadequate, and full of loopholes that contribute to abuses of human rights and nature.
• Phase out existing stockpiles and production of fossil fuels in line with keeping global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and in line with the principles of a just transition for every worker, community, and country.
• Draw from research that demonstrates that phasing out fossil fuel supply should be prioritized in wealthy, diversified economies that are in the best position to lead in large-scale transformative action right now with the least social cost. These include countries like Canada, the U.K., U.S., and Norway.

🔎 People’s monitoring body for polluting industry activity

Create a democratically controlled, independent formal monitoring body that tracks, documents, and publicizes the activities of polluting corporations.

What does this look like?

• While there are a variety of initiatives that monitor and attribute the greenhouse gas emissions that can be directly attributed to specific corporations at source, establish a body to focus specifically on closely monitoring:
  • Indirect emissions that occur throughout the value chain of a corporation (sometimes referred to as Scope 3 emissions).
  • General pollution caused throughout the value chain of a corporation, such as the contamination of water by heavy metals or the pollution caused by waste and garbage in the ocean.
  • Identifying actions, inactions, and business decisions of corporations that contribute to or have the consequence of violating environmental and human rights
  • Attempts by polluting industries and corporations to advance climate change denial, deception, greenwashing, and interference with policymaking on all levels of governance, and track and trace the finances spent toward these activities
• This monitoring body should be housed independently of multilateral or bilateral institutions (i.e. a monitoring body of the people), and should be comprised of independent experts and representatives of frontline communities.
• Monitoring activities should include unannounced and periodic field audits to be able to more accurate identify and access true environmental and social impact of polluting corporations’ practices.

🔎 Independent international expert committee on liability

Establish a democratically controlled, independent international liability expert committee to develop guidelines that support the drafting and implementation of binding international, regional, national, sub-national, and local legislation that advances liability mechanisms.

What does this look like?

• This expert group should be housed independently of multilateral or bilateral institutions), and should be comprised of independent experts, attorneys, and representatives of frontline communities.
• Ensure representation by people on the front lines of the climate and environmental crisis who hold first-hand expertise on polluting industries’ abuses and impacts of climate change.
• Ensure the work of this committee is bound by timelines that match the urgency of the need.
• Protect the work of this committee from the undue influence and manipulation of polluting corporations and industries, or those directly or indirectly representing them.

🔎 Compel the release of industry documents

Through measures laid out elsewhere in this roadmap, or via other means, decision-makers may obtain access to industry documents that evidence wrongdoing. Releasing this data is critical for people, civil society, the media, and officials alike to hold corporations accountable for their harms.

What does this look like?

• Provide for and utilize the right to freedom of information and related legislation, as well as access to information as per Principle 10 of the Rio Convention.
• Publicly disclose and release any data and documentation from polluting corporations that has been previously withheld from the public, making it possible to monitor and expose their wrongdoings.
• Click here to read about the lessons learned through the precedent of advancing tobacco industry liability through the Master Settlement Agreement.

🔎 Protect policymaking from polluters’ manipulation

Pass and implement conflict-of-interest policies and legislations to create the space for policymakers and public-serving actors to advance justice and real solutions.

What does this look like?

• Reduce the ability of polluters to advance policymaking that protects their profits by implementing measures to firewall policymaking from their interference and influence.
• This includes but is not limited to:
  1. instituting a firewall to end polluting industry access to decision-making processes.
  2. addressing vested or conflicting interests.
  3. ending preferential treatment of and rejecting partnerships with individuals and institutions or organizations directly or indirectly representing dirty or destructive industries.

🔎 End business with polluters

Withhold a corporation’s license to pollute and abuse by blacklisting polluting corporations, especially those that are currently under public scrutiny or investigation.

What does this look like?

• Ban corporations that are currently the subject of legal investigations or found guilty through such investigations (sub-nationally, nationally, regionally or internationally) for allegations related to fraud, misconduct, or human rights abuses from receiving any privilege or incentives, including but not limited to subsidies, stimulus funds, tax breaks, and access to policymaking spaces and negotiations.
• International institutions such as the UN bodies and the World Bank or other financing and investment bodies cease relationships with, or blacklist, these corporations.
  • These measures should also be taken toward polluting corporations and industries in general, in addition to applying them immediately to entities under legal scrutiny.
  • End the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business rankings, which grades economies not on the strength of their environmental or corporate accountability policies, but effectively pressures countries to deregulate.
  • Cut ties and contracts with such corporations at all levels, including local-level partnerships that allow polluters to “greenwash” their image and buy goodwill among community members.

🔎 Recognize and deliver climate reparations

Global South communities, women, youth, Black and other communities of colour, and Indigenous communities are on the front lines of the climate crisis. Recognize that they are owed reparations for the damage wrought by climate change and polluting or destructive corporate practices. And deliver reparations by requiring these corporations to sincerely apologize and address the damage they cause and debts owed.

What does this look like?

• Require corporations to provide public, sincere apologies to communities and individuals that have endured abuse, in some case for decades, and whose lives, livelihoods, homes and cultures have been adversely affected or lost as a result.
• Distribute and deliver reparations owed to communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis by requiring corporations to pay their climate debt to these communities, while acknowledging such a debt can never be fully paid.
• Reparations must not create dependence on polluting corporations and the mechanism for delivery of reparation- whether financial or otherwise- should be led by the affected person or persons.
• Reparations could be delivered in part through a variety of means, subject to the approval of affected communities, including:
  • Direct compensation for losses incurred (both past, present, and future).
  • Restoring land unlawfully or unduly under the control of polluting corporations back to its natural stewards, i.e. indigenous communities or local/frontline communities including women, peasants, fisherfolks, nomadic and rural peoples.
  • Making accessible technology that directly helps impacted communities respond to and address the impacts of climate change.
• Cancel any and all debt from Global South countries or frontline communities that arises out of financing real and legitimate climate action within a country.
• Align reparations measures with the demands of frontline communities based in a country/jurisdiction calling for reparations.