31
Vulnerable sectors are also impacted, such as women and children, indigenous
peoples, older adults, and persons with disabilities.
Climate change also impacts the rights of future generations, which brings to fore the
duty of stewardship upon the present.
Climate change is also now a major cause of migration, and a threat to global security.
Professor Erin Daly, CHRP resource person, explains the relationship of climate
change impacts and human dignity, which is at the core of all human rights, as follows:
Focusing on human dignity helps us see the interdependence, the
interrelatedness, the indivisibility of our human rights, which is in
fact how deprivation of rights are experienced by people. When
a typhoon hits, it is not just independently the loss of a house,
the loss of a school, the loss of family, the loss of health care, the
lack of water, food insecurity of the end of hope that needs to be
vindicated, but all of these churning together in combination and in
turmoil that makes the experience of climate impacts so devastating
and so threatening to human dignity. 135
Petitioner Veronica Cabe, a survivor of Typhoon Ketsana (local: Ondoy), testified:
…The floods have changed our lives. I felt like parts of our dignity
was lost because we felt displaced.
We felt displaced, we didn’t have our own space. We were forced
to live with friends who were willing to share their homes with
us. We were separated from each other. My nephews lived in
another relative’s house.We relied on relief goods and donations for
months. I recall every day I had to queue in line and wait for hours,
half a day every day waiting for possible relief. We did not know if
relief would come and then line up again for another day. And then
relief foods were thrown at us, and I saw my neighbors struggling
against each other just to get their share. It was chaotic that time.
The government was not ready for an Ondoy flood that time. And
one important thing is that we had to borrow money from everyone
because we did not have money.136
135
T.S.N. of the Fourth Inquiry Hearing dated 27-28 September 2018, at 157.
136
T.S.N. of the Fifth Inquiry Hearing dated 6-7 November 2018, at 110-111.
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