Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and former High Commissioner for Human Rights at the United Nations has established the Mary Robinson Foundation for Climate Justice. The Foundation is a centre for thought leadership, education and advocacy on the struggle to secure global justice for victims of climate change who are usually forgotten – the poor, the disempowered and the marginalised across the world. The Foundation will be based at Trinity College, Dublin.
It is a platform for solidarity, partnership and shared engagement for all who care about global justice, whether as individuals and communities suffering injustice or as advocates for fairness in resource-rich societies. The Foundation provides a space for facilitating action on climate justice to empower the poorest people and countries in their efforts to achieve sustainable and people-centred development.
Mary Robinson delivered the 11th lecture in the EPA’s series of lectures on Climate Change on Tuesday 23 November 2010 to a packed Mansion House. In the course of the lecture she said:
"In hard times it can be difficult to attend to the long term. When recession and debt pose urgent constraints, ten-year targets and fifty-year plans may appear a luxury.
Climate change can appear far away, in both time and space. And yet, of course, it is not far away, it is not merely a ‘long-term’ problem. Climate change is what we are doing right here and right now."
"What is crystal clear is that, from now on, the wellbeing of those in richer and poorer countries is intimately related... it is not enough for me to realise that my carbon-saturated life here today has in part caused the climate refugee fleeing her flooded home in Bangladesh tomorrow. I must also recognise that if she is to be
denied access to carbon-fuelled economic growth, I must also, surely, be obliged to provide her some substitute form of wherewithal."
Climate justice links human rights and development to achieve a human-centered approach, safeguarding the rights of the most vulnerable and sharing the burdens and benefits of climate change and its resolution equitably and fairly.
Climate justice insists that all the peoples of the world (and not just the rich and powerful) have a right to development. A developmental approach to climate justice recognises this fact while also demanding that it should be made both possible and attractive for such development to occur in a sustainable way
Further details can be found at www.mrfcj.org
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