Author: Compiled by The Energy Mix staff

Global Optimism founding partner Christiana Figueres speaking at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2020 in Switzerland. (WEF/flickr)

Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat and former United Nations climate change secretary who helped bring the 2015 Paris agreement to life, has been named co-chair of a new commission on sea level rise, health, and justice.

The commission is hosted by The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals. “Lancet Commissions are international collaborations that analyse major global health issues and influence policy,” the Guardian explains. This one “will examine legal frameworks to hold countries accountable for the health harms of sea-level rise,” with results due by September, 2027.

The commission “will analyse how sea-level rise reshapes health and well-being and deepens injustice, proposing actionable responses for governments, communities, and global institutions,” Figueres and colleagues write in a Lancet commentary this week. They note that small island states and countries across the Western Pacific “are already experiencing extreme impacts” due to sea level rise, including intergenerational trauma and inequity due to displacement, “despite minimal contribution by these countries to driving emissions.”

While the commission’s launch was not timed to coincide with American/Israeli war on Iran, Figueres called the resulting energy shock “dramatic proof” that fossil fuel dependence drives geopolitical instability. Sea level rise “is happening now, it is a crisis of health, and it is the mother of all injustices,” she told media. “Just from a health perspective, it is now affecting drinking water, it’s affecting sanitation, it’s affecting food security because of the salinization of all of these lands that are ocean front.”

At the same time, “life as experienced at the water’s edge not only impacts coastal peoples, but also affects communities and populations everywhere,” Figueres and the other commissioners state in their Lancet commentary. “As the haunting Indigenous Pacific Islander proverb, shared by Commissioner Brianna Fruean, reminds us, ‘What is felt on the coast, will soon be felt inland. What is felt by the East, will also be felt by the West’.”