Pollution is responsible for more deaths worldwide than Covid-19, says a United Nations environmental report today. The author calls for “immediate and ambitious action” to ban some toxic chemicals.
According to the report, pollution from pesticides, plastics and electronic waste leads to at least nine million premature deaths each year worldwide. Such pollution is a serious violation of human rights, but the problem is largely overlooked, it said.
By comparison, according to Worldometer, the corona pandemic is responsible for 5.9 million deaths so far.
“The current approach to the risks of pollution and toxic substances is clearly inadequate, leading to widespread violations of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment,” concluded UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment David Boyd, the author of the report.
“I think we have an ethical and now a legal obligation to do better for these people,” he told Reuters.
The report, to be presented next month at the UN Human Rights Council, which has declared a clean environment a human right, was published today on the Council’s website.
The report calls for a ban on PFAS: poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances used in, for example, pots with a non-stick coating. The substances are associated with cancer, and called “eternal chemicals” because they are very difficult to biodegrade.
In addition, Boyd’s report also calls for the clean-up of polluted sites and, in extreme cases, for the relocation of affected – often poor, marginalized or indigenous – communities from “sacrifice zones”: areas that have become uninhabitable as a result of the serious pollution or climate change.
“What I hope to accomplish by telling these sacrificial zone stories is to give a human face to this otherwise incomprehensible and inexplicable statistic of pollution deaths,” Boyd said. The latest report, he says, is the toughest yet and the rapporteur expects headwinds when he presents it to the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
According to Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the threat to the environment is the greatest human rights challenge worldwide. Human rights are successfully referred to in more and more court cases involving climate and environmental law.
On February 28, a UN environmental conference will start in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, where, among other things, chemical waste will be negotiated. A proposal to establish a special panel, similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will also be discussed.
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