Human
caused climate change is a climate catastrophe that is destroying the
ecological integrity of the Earth system, its capacity for self-regulation, stability,
moderate temperatures, and resilience. On
analogy with genocide, this level of destruction is termed “ecocide.” The most pessimistic report predicts that “if warming reaches or exceeds 2°C this
century, mainly richer humans [mostly from the Global North] will be
responsible for killing roughly 1 billion mainly poorer humans [especially in
the Global South] through anthropogenic global warming.” This makes climate catastrophe an indirect
genocide, a genocidal ecocide. Because
the threat is of an impending genocide, then an
ethical response to this challenge, a theory of justice for the twenty-first
century, must be an emergency ethics, an ethics that overrides the
claims of business as usual. The primary moral obligations of the emergency
ethics would be, first, the urgent activation of an Ecocide Convention; and
second, a reigniting of the project of international human rights with a
primary emphasis on social rights. An Ecocide
Convention and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) would thus become the
primary obligations for Earth Justice.