As the United Nations-led Global Stocktake is being finalised, the Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO) has offered two submissions to this assessment of international action on climate change.

QUNO’s submission was made on behalf of the Quaker organisation, Friends World Committee for Consultation, which it represents at the United Nations (UN).

QUNO also joined 25 international organisations, as part of the Human Rights & Climate Change Working Group, make a submission to highlight the importance of “integrating human rights into the Global Stocktake”. It is available for download here.

The Global Stocktake is a periodic review and the first one is meant to be released at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP28) at the end of 2023. Its primary objectives are to assess individual countries’ efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and transition to renewable energy sources. It is aimed at keeping countries accountable on climate action. The Global Stocktake was established under the UN Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty on climate change which encourages global action to help humanity and nature avert catastrophic temperature rise due to human activities. Numerous countries have voluntarily signed this agreement.

International environmental law is central to climate action. For example, the 2015 Paris Agreement, is a universal climate change agreement through which both developing and developed countries work together on climate mitigation and adaptation. This 2-sider offers an overview of some of the key agreements and sources of international environmental law that can benefit local and national climate action efforts.

Incorporating human rights into climate policies and actions is known as a human rights-based approach. Human rights-based approaches ensure public inclusion and promote fairness, leading to more coherent, legitimate and sustainable policy outcomes. Whilst some countries resist human rights, human rights-based approaches ensure that climate action is approached as both a technical effort to cut emissions and as an effort to address human rights and social inequality. This 2-sider offers a brief introduction to the topic alongside inspiring examples from all over the world of what is being done to protect people and planet.

ON 10 November 2022, QUNO Human Impacts of Climate Change representative, Lindsey Fielder Cook, spoke on an expert panel to over 60 country negotiators and civil society at the Global Stocktake Technical Dialogue on international cooperation for holistic and integrated approaches to addressing the climate crisis. Lindsey began by asking the negotiators and civil society to engage from both the head and heart before speaking on what holistic and integrated approaches mean, and then celebrating several recent examples of international cooperation which represent such approaches. Afterwards, Lindsey reflected on holistic and integrated approaches that can dramatically scale up climate action but need greater international cooperation that the Global Stocktake engagement can signal. Several such approaches included rights-based approaches, the importance of sustainable and just economic systems, as well as what real human security, and how the GST can embrace language of responsibility. 

The following brief was submitted to the Human Rights Advisory Committee in response to a questionnaire on the impact of new technologies for climate protection on the enjoyment of human rights. The submission outlines the human rights abuse concerns linked to geo and climate engineering technologies and includes detailed references to findings from the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) AR6 Report.