Memorandum for the Petitioners | 94 environmental treaties, such as the United Framework Convention on Climate Change... . Nations XXXK A safe climate is a vital element of the right to a healthy environment and is absolutely essential to human life and well-being. . . . “8 (Emphasis supplied) A copy of the 2019 Safe Climate Report is attached hereto and made an integral part hereof as Annex “F.” 8.65. Climate polluting activities, such as GHGs from the respondent Carbon Majors’ products and services, impact directly on the rights to a clean and healthy environment and a safe climate.“ The right to a healthy environment is a basis for the enjoyment of other human rights. It is a right that everyone enjoys, as well as future generations. This was clearly elucidated by the Supreme Court in its landmark decision in the case of Oposa v. Factoran:'"° While the right to a balanced and healthful ecology is to be found under the Declaration of Principles and State Policies and not under the Bill of Rights, it does not follow that it is less important than any of the civil and political rights enumerated in the latter. Such a right belongs to a different category of rights altogether for it concerns nothing less than self-preservation and self-perpetuation — aptly and fittingly stressed by the petitioners — the advancement of which may even be said to predate all governments and constitutions. As a matter of fact, these basic rights need not even be written in the Constitution for they are assumed to exist from the inception of humankind. If they are now explicitly mentioned in the fundamental charter, it is because of the well-founded fear of its framers that unless the rights to a balanced and healthful ecology and to health are mandated as state policies by the Constitution itself, thereby highlighting their continuing importance and imposing upon the state a solemn obligation to preserve the first and protect and advance the second, the day would not be too far when all else would be lost not only for the present generation, but also for those to come — generations which stand to inherit nothing but parched earth incapable of sustaining life. “°8 United Nations General Assembly (15 July 2019), Report of the Special Rapporteur on the issue of human rights obligations relating to the enjoyment of a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment, A/74/161 (hereinafter, “2019 UN Safe Climate Report”), paras. 43 and 96, available at https://undocs.org/en/A/74/161 (last accessed on 12 September 2019). Annex “F” hereof. “© Boyd, D., supra note 398, pp. 19-20; See also, Our Children’s Trust, Joint Summary of the Amicus Curiae, supra note 50, p. 52 (“As one example, U.S. District Court Judge Ann Aiken’s November 2016 decision in Juliana v. United States of America found both that the U.S. Constitution provides a fundamental right to a stable climate system and that the public trust doctrine is an inherent aspect of sovereignty that cannot be “legislated away.”). 40 GR. No. 101083, 30 July 1993.