Midnight Survival campaign for the planet

Video message by Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

4 December 2020

The Climate Vulnerable Forum represents many of the people and countries most affected by climate change. Millions whose homes, lands, well-being and future are under imminent threat. People whose lives are at risk.

So when the Climate Vulnerable Forum speaks of the urgent need for ambitious climate action, we need to listen and act.

Climate change must be stopped. It can be stopped – with clarity about how we are generating these environmental harms; action to end those processes; human ingenuity; and international solidarity.

It is time to act – now. In recent years, the Forum has spoken often and authoritatively – insisting that today's children, and future generations, have a right to thrive, in a greener world, and demanding that all nations no matter how big or small, rich or poor, blameless or culpable, take action to limit global heating to no more than 1.5°C.

The Forum’s Midnight Survival Campaign for the Planet is telling us that we have waited for too long – that now, we must scramble, rapidly, to save human lives and our shared home.

Under the Paris Agreement, it is time to renew and update nationally determined contributions. This is an opportunity for every State to build momentum by adopting human rights-based policies that are powerful enough to tackle climate change.

For the Paris Agreement to succeed in protecting our lives and rights from the looming climate catastrophe, all States need to increase their commitments. And the Climate Vulnerable Forum’s Midnight Survival Campaign makes it very clear that for the world’s most climate vulnerable people, this is a matter of survival.

It is also a matter of respecting, protecting and fulfilling human rights.

I am proud to join the Forum in calling for all States to update their nationally determined contributions before the clock strikes midnight on 31 December 2020.