AUSTRALIAN CLIMATE ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT Inquiry into Climate Change Amendment (Duty of Care and

Inquiry into Climate Change Amendment (Duty of Care and Intergenerational Climate Equity) Bill 2023 Submission to the Senate Standing Committee on the Environment and Communications Australian Climate Accountability Project 22 November 2023 2 About the Australian Climate Accountability Project The Australian Climate Accountability Project is an initiative of the Australian Human Rights Institute. [...] The Project aims to quantify Australia’s greatest contribution to global warming – the emissions from the burning overseas of its coal and LNG exports – and to argue the human rights case for an orderly but rapid and just phase-out of these exports. [...] The new evidence and analysis which the Project provides will empower communities at the frontline of climate impacts to seek protection of their human rights, and will support change-makers and the broader Australian public to demand accountability by Australian governments and the exporting corporations for the intensified harms, attributable to those massive exported emissions, to our communiti. [...] 26, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child stated that the ‘adverse effects of climate change’ on the enjoyment of children’s rights ‘give rise to obligations of states to take actions to protect against those effects’. [...] These facts lead to the view that decision-makers in Australia do owe an effective duty of care to children in their territory, and that the seriousness and foreseeability of the threats to present and future children in Australia compel, for certainty, statutory statement of the duty.