Climate Rights International Demands Action to Protect People from Climate Change and Human RightsViolations

Before the pandemic, Brad Adams, then the executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division, would often drive his two kids and their friends to and from school in Berkeley and listen in on their wide-ranging backseat conversations. 

“Aside from baseball, the thing they talked about most was climate change and how they felt it was screwing up the world,” Adams says. “They often expressed hopelessness about their future.”

Those carpool confessions of climate despair left an unforgettable mark. In 2022, Adams left his job at Human Rights Watch to launch a new nonprofit venture aimed at protecting people and the planet called Climate Rights International. 

Climate Rights International sets its sights on investigating and holding governments and corporations around the world accountable for what Adams refers to as “climate change-related human rights violations… Climate change causes human rights violations, but many people don’t realize that human rights violations are also leading to climate change.” 

The nonprofit, which launched this past summer, builds upon Adams’s 20 years of experience at Human Rights Watch – where he fought for freedom of speech and labor rights, and against human-trafficking and authoritarian dictatorships – and will harness a similar model: to put a human face on the people harmed by climate change, publicly shame abusive governments and corporations, and support litigation on subjects such as polluted supply chains and “greenwashing.” 

First up on the climate rights watch list is indigenous communities who are losing their land through deforestation.

“Whether it’s in Brazil or Indonesia or the Democratic Republic of Congo, deforestation is usually the result of corporate decisions,” he says. “For example, in Brazil, 80% of deforestation is to create more cattle grazing space for the beef industry, much of which is exported to the U.S. and elsewhere.”

Climate Rights International will use its well-established high-level contacts in government and business to press for change, and to connect activists on the front lines fighting climate change to senior policymakers, such as in the U.S. State Department.

They also intend to raise awareness among consumers who want to do the right thing for climate change, but who unwittingly contribute to it by eating beef or avocados that are causing deforestation, or by driving cars whose nickel-charged batteries were made possible by the forced removal of indigenous people off their land to mine the metal. 

“The goal is to put the responsibility on the government to require companies to only sell products in ways that don’t contribute to climate change or human rights violations. We have a responsibility to protect the planet from further damage,” says Adams. “We owe our kids and our grandkids the right to a future.”