Context

• In recent years, courts around the world have been increasingly called upon to address the intersection of climate change and human rights.
• Two landmark decisions, one by the European Court of Human Rights in Switzerland and another by the Supreme Court of India, have underscored the urgency of recognising climate change as a human rights crisis.
• These rulings set important precedents for legal accountability and policy action to address the adverse impacts of climate change on individuals and communities.

Legal Recognition of Climate Change Impacts on Human Rights

• The European Court of Human Rights' decision against the Government of Switzerland highlights the failure to protect women senior citizens from the impacts of climate change.
• The Supreme Court of India's ruling affirms the right to be free from adverse climate impacts under constitutional provisions.
  • It ruled that people have a right ‘to be free from the adverse impacts of climate change,’ citing Articles 14 (equality before law and the equal protection of laws) and 21 (right to life and personal liberty) of the Indian Constitution as the sources.
• These decisions mark a significant shift towards recognising climate change as a fundamental human rights issue.

Global Climate Crisis: A Threat to Human Rights

• The global climate crisis poses an existential threat to human rights, affecting individuals and communities across the world.
• The State of the Global Climate Report released by the World Meteorological Organisation provides compelling evidence of the escalating impacts of climate change.
• In 2023, numerous climate change indicators reached record levels, confirming it as the hottest year on record.
• This unprecedented heat was accompanied by other alarming trends, including ocean heat accumulation, sea level rise, Antarctic Sea ice loss, and glacier retreat.
• These trends signify the profound stress that the planet is under, with far-reaching consequences for human well-being.

India's Climate Action and Vulnerability

• Highly Vulnerable Despite Significant Progress
  • India, as one of the world's fastest-growing economies, has made significant strides in addressing climate change.
  • India has already achieved two of its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) targets, reducing the emissions intensity of its GDP by 33% to 35% from 2005 level.
  • India has also achieved 40% cumulative electric power installed capacity from non-fossil fuel sources, well ahead of the target year of 2030.
  • However, despite these efforts, the country remains highly vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change.
• Population Vulnerability to Climate-Induced Disasters
  • One of the key factors contributing to India's vulnerability is the geographical distribution of its population.
  • More than 80% of India's population resides in districts that are at high risk of climate-induced disasters, including floods, cyclones, droughts, and heatwaves.
  • These extreme weather events not only disrupt livelihoods but also exacerbate existing socio-economic inequalities, disproportionately affecting vulnerable communities, such as smallholder farmers, rural populations, and marginalised groups.
• Intersection of Climate Change with Socio-economic and Environmental Challenges
  • Moreover, the impacts of climate change intersect with other socio-economic and environmental challenges in India, amplifying their effects.
  • For example, rapid urbanisation and unplanned development exacerbate the vulnerability of urban populations to climate-related disasters, such as flooding and landslides.

Plausible Legal Frameworks for India’s Climate Action

• Adoption of an Overreaching Regulation
  • One approach to enhancing India's climate governance is the adoption of an overarching regulation specifically focused on climate change.
  • Such a regulation would provide a consolidated and coherent framework for addressing various aspects of climate action, including mitigation, adaptation, finance, and capacity-building.
  • By codifying climate-related objectives, targets, and strategies into law, an overarching regulation can provide legal certainty and stability, guiding long-term planning and investment decisions.
• Lessons from Global Climate Framework Laws
  • A study by the London School of Economics and Political Science analysed climate change framework laws across 60 countries, highlighting their role in establishing the strategic direction for national climate policies.
  • Countries such as Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Finland, South Korea, South Africa, and the Philippines have enacted comprehensive climate laws that go beyond meeting international commitments and conventions.
  • These laws have facilitated the mobilisation of public sector resources, increased capacity for climate action, and promoted cross-sectoral collaboration.

Some Other Measures to Enhance India’s Climate Governance

• Holistic Approach to Climate Policies
  • Furthermore, India's climate policies should adopt a holistic approach that integrates climate considerations into broader development planning and decision-making processes.
  • This entails mainstreaming climate adaptation and mitigation measures across sectors, such as agriculture, water resources, energy, transportation, and urban planning, to ensure a coordinated and synergistic response to climate change.
• Localised Approaches and Inter-sectoral Collaboration
  • Localised approaches to climate action, coupled with inter-sectoral collaboration, are essential for addressing the diverse and context-specific challenges posed by climate change.
  • By engaging stakeholders at the local level and fostering collaboration across sectors, governments can develop targeted and effective strategies to build resilience, reduce vulnerabilities, and promote sustainable development.
• Integration of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
  • Localised approaches to climate action often intersect with broader SDGs, such as poverty alleviation, food security, access to clean water and sanitation, and gender equality.
  • By integrating climate considerations into local-level planning and implementation of the SDGs, governments can promote synergies and co-benefits across sectors, maximise resource efficiency, and enhance the overall resilience and sustainability of communities.
• Empowering Civil Society
  • Civil society plays a critical role in advocating for climate action, promoting environmental justice, and holding governments and corporations accountable for their actions.
  • Empowering civil society organizations (CSOs) and promoting rights-based dialogue on climate change are essential for promoting inclusive decision-making processes, ensuring transparency, and advancing environmental and social justice.
• Ensuring Inclusivity and Representation
  • Promoting inclusivity and diversity within civil society is crucial for ensuring that the voices and perspectives of marginalised and vulnerable communities are heard and integrated into climate policies and programs.
  • CSOs should strive to represent the interests of diverse stakeholders, including women, indigenous peoples, youth, persons with disabilities, and other marginalised groups, in climate decision-making processes.
• Promoting Rights-Based Dialogue
  • A rights-based approach to climate action recognises that climate change disproportionately impacts vulnerable and marginalised communities.
  • It violates their fundamental human rights, including the rights to life, health, food, water, and livelihoods.
  • By framing climate change as a human rights issue, CSOs can advocate for policies and initiatives that prioritise the needs and interests of affected communities and promote environmental justice.

 Conclusion

• The convergence of legal decisions, scientific evidence, and policy imperatives underscores the urgent need to address climate change as a human rights crisis.
• By recognising the interdependence of environmental sustainability and human well-being, nations can chart a path towards climate resilience and justice.
• Empowering communities, strengthening legal frameworks, and fostering inter-sectoral collaboration are essential steps towards realising a future free from the adverse impacts of climate change.

Why in news?

Global leaders will gather in Canada's capital -Ottawa- to discuss progress in drafting a first-ever global treaty to rein in soaring plastic pollution by the end of the year. This treaty is expected to be finalized by the end of this year.

If negotiated and agreed upon by members, this treaty could be the most significant deal relating to climate-warming emissions and environmental protection since the 2015 Paris Agreement.

What’s in today’s article?

• United Nations Environment Assembly
• Plastic treaty talks - Background
• Problems associated with plastics
• Negotiation in Ottawa

United Nations Environment Assembly(UNEA)

• About
  • UNEA is the world’s highest-level decision-making body on the environment.
  • UNEA enjoys the universal membership of all 193 UN Member States and the full involvement of major groups and stakeholders.
  • It gathers ministers of environment in Nairobi, Kenya every 2 years.
• Creation
  • UNEA was created in 2012, as an outcome of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), held in Brazil.
• Function
  • UNEA sets the global environmental agenda, provides overarching policy guidance, and defines policy responses to address emerging environmental challenges.

Plastic treaty talks - Background

• At the UN Environmental Assembly in 2022, the world's nations agreed to develop a legally binding agreement by the end of 2024 to address the world's plastic pollution crisis.
• The treaty is meant to address plastics through their entire lifecycle - from when they are produced, to how they are used and then disposed of.

Problem with plastics

• Source of pollution
  • Producing plastics involves releasing greenhouse gas emissions.
• Contribution in global carbon emissions
  • The plastic industry now accounts for 5 per cent of global carbon emissions, which could grow to 20 per cent by 2050 if current trends continue.
• Increased plastic production
  • Plastic production is on track to triple by 2060 - unless the treaty sets production limits, as some have proposed. Most virgin plastic is derived from petroleum.

Negotiation in Ottawa

• Challenges
  • Countries have become divided on the issues during three previous rounds of talks - held in Punta del Este (Uruguay), Paris and most recently in Nairobi.
  • At the Nairobi talks, in November 2022, the draft treaty under review ballooned from 30 pages to 70 as some countries insisted on including their objections to more ambitious measures like production limits and phase-outs.
  • Countries are now under pressure to find common ground before the final negotiations are held in December in Busan, South Korea.
• What do countries want in the treaty?
  • Demands of group of Like-Minded Countries
    • Many plastic and petrochemical-producing countries have opposed mentioning production limits.
    • These countries include Saudi Arabia, Iran and China and are known collectively as the group of Like-Minded Countries.
  • Demands of High-Ambition Coalition
    • The 60-nation High-Ambition Coalition, which includes EU countries, island nations, Japan and the UAE, wants to end plastic pollution by 2040.
    • This coalition has called for common, legally binding provisions to restrain and reduce the production and consumption of primary plastic polymers to sustainable levels.
    • They also are proposing measures such as phasing out problematic single-use plastics and banning certain chemical additives that could carry health risks.
• What does the petrochemical industry want?
• The major petrochemical producers argue that:
  • production caps would lead to higher prices for consumers, and
  • the treaty should address plastics only after they are made.
• These companies want to focus on encouraging the reuse or recycling of plastics, and on developing the market for burning plastics as fuel.
• In terms of transparency about chemicals used in production, the group says companies should be allowed to disclose those chemicals voluntarily.
• What do corporate brands want?
  • More than 200 consumer-facing companies including Unilever, PepsiCo and Walmart have joined the so-called Business Coalition for a Plastics Treaty.
  • Like the petrochemical industry, these companies that rely on plastic packaging for their products have been a major presence in the plastics negotiations.
  • But they support a treaty that includes production caps, use restrictions and phase-outs, reuse policies, product design requirements, extended producer responsibility, and waste management.

Why in the News?

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) has published a report title "Ensuring safety and health at work in a changing climate".

What’s in Today’s Article?

• About ILO (Background, Objectives, Members, etc.)
• About ILO’s Report (Key Highlights of the Report)

About International Labour Organisation:

• The ILO was created in 1919, as part of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I, to reflect the belief that universal and lasting peace can be accomplished only if it’s based on social justice.
• In 1946, the ILO became a specialized agency of the United Nations.
• The ILO is devoted to promoting social justice and internationally recognized human and labour rights, pursuing its founding mission that labour peace is essential to prosperity.
• Headquarters: Geneva, Switzerland

Objectives of ILO:

• The ILO has four strategic objectives:
  • Promote and realize standards and fundamental principles and rights at work,
  • Create greater opportunities for women and men to decent employment and income,
  • Enhance the coverage and effectiveness of social protection for all, and
  • Strengthen tripartism and social dialogue.

Membership of ILO:

• The ILO has 187 state members.
• India is a founding member of the ILO and it has been a permanent member of the ILO Governing Body since 1922.
• The ILO constitution permits any member of the UN to become a member of the ILO.
• To gain membership, a nation must inform the director-general that it accepts all the obligations of the ILO constitution.

Ensuring Safety and Health at Work in a Changing Climate Report:

• The ILO published this report to bring attention to the global health threat workers are currently facing.
• A scoping exercise was conducted to identify the most recent trends and priorities for climate change and worker safety and health.
• Based on the available evidence, the report addresses the following key issues:
  • Excessive heat
  • Ultraviolet (UV) radiation
  • Extreme weather events
  • Workplace air pollution
  • Vector-borne diseases
  • Agrochemicals
• Key Highlights of the Report:
• 
  • Billions of workers are exposed to hazards exacerbated by climate change.
  • Workers across different sectors are exposed to these hazards but some workers, such as agricultural workers and other outdoor workers carrying out heavy labour in hot climates are particularly at risk.
  • Strong evidence demonstrates that numerous health conditions in workers have been linked to climate change, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, respiratory illnesses, kidney dysfunction and mental health conditions, among many others.
  • Every year, an estimated 22.85 million occupational injuries, 18,970 deaths and 2.09 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) are attributable to excessive heat alone.
  • Thousands more die from pesticide poisoning (>300,000), workplace air pollution (>860,000), solar UV radiation (>18,960 due to non-melanoma skin cancer alone) and parasitic and vector-borne diseases.

Why in news?

Meta has introduced its most capable Large Language Model (LLM), the Meta Llama 3. It also introduced an image generator, which updates pictures in real-time even as the user types out the prompt.

What’s in today’s article?

• Large Language Models (LLMs)
• Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs)
• Llama 3

Large Language Models (LLMs)

• Large language models use deep learning techniques to process large amounts of text.
• They work by processing vast amounts of text, understanding the structure and meaning, and learning from it.
• LLMs are trained to identify meanings and relationships between words.
• The greater the amount of training data a model is fed, the smarter it gets at understanding and producing text.
  • The training data is usually large datasets, such as Wikipedia, Open Web Text, and the Common Crawl Corpus.
  • These contain large amounts of text data, which the models use to understand and generate natural language.

Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs)

• GPTs are a type of LLM that use transformer neural networks to generate human-like text.
• GPTs are trained on large amounts of unlabelled text data from the internet, enabling them to understand and generate coherent and contextually relevant text.
• They can be fine-tuned for specific tasks like: Language generation, Sentiment analysis, Language modelling, Machine translation, Text classification.
• GPTs use self-attention mechanisms to focus on different parts of the input text during each processing step.
• This allows GPT models to capture more context and improve performance on natural language processing (NLP) tasks.
  • NLP is the ability of a computer program to understand human language as it is spoken and written -- referred to as natural language.

Llama 3

• About
  • Llama or Large Language Model Meta AI is a family of LLMs introduced by Meta AI in February 2023.
  • The first version of the model was released in four sizes — 7B, 13B, 33B, and 65 billion parameters.
  • As per the reports, the 13B model of Llama outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-3 which had 135 billion parameters.
    • Parameters are a measure of the size and complexity of an AI model.
    • Generally, a larger number of parameters means an AI model is more complex and powerful.
• Features
  • Llama 3 is claimed to be the most sophisticated model with significant progress in terms of performance and AI capabilities.
  • Llama 3, which is based on the Llama 2 architecture, has been released in two sizes, 8B and 70B parameters.
  • Both sizes come with a base model and an instruction-tuned version that has been designed to augment performance in specific tasks.
    • The instruction-tuned version is meant for powering AI chatbots that are meant to hold conversations with users.
  • For now, Meta has released text-based models in the Llama 3 collection of models.
    • However, the company has plans to make it multilingual and multimodal, accept longer context, all while continuing to improve performance across LLM abilities such as coding and reasoning.
  • All models of Llama 3 support context lengths of 8,000 tokens. This allows for more interactions, and complex input handling compared to Llama 2 or 1.
    • More tokens here mean more content input or prompts from users and more content as a response from the model.

Why in News?

Sunita Kejriwal, wife of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, was appointed as a ‘star campaigner’ by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for its campaign in Gujarat.

What’s in Today’s Article?

• What are the Legal Provisions for Star Campaigners?
• What Benefits Do Star Campaigners Get?
• What are the Concerns Regarding Campaigning by the Star Campaigners?
• What Needs to be Done to Maintain Decorum and Restraint in Campaigning?

What are the Legal Provisions for Star Campaigners?

• Section 77 of the Representation of the People Act 1951 (RP Act) provides for law relating to expenditure incurred by ‘leaders of a political party’.
  • These ‘leaders of a political party’ are popularly known as ‘star campaigners’.
• These star campaigners are usually the top leaders of a political party but can include other celebrities as well.
• The only requirement is that these persons have to be members of the political party that appoints them.
• The RP Act provides that a recognised political party (national or State) can appoint a maximum of 40-star campaigners while a registered unrecognised political party can appoint up to 20.
• These names are to be communicated to the Election Commission (EC) and Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of the States as applicable within seven days from the date of notification of such election.
• In case of a multi-phase election, a political party can submit a separate list of star campaigners for different phases.

What Benefits Do Star Campaigners Get?

• The RP Act provides that expenditure incurred by the ‘leaders of a political party’ on account of travel for campaigning for their political party shall not be deemed to be part of the election expenditure of a candidate of such party.
  • The election expenditure limit for candidates is ₹95 lakh per Lok Sabha constituency in larger States and ₹75 lakh in smaller States.
  • Hence, these star campaigners would be vote-fetchers for candidates set up by respective parties without affecting their expenditure limit.
• However, this is applicable only if the star campaigners limit themselves to general campaigning for the party.
  • If in any rally/meeting organised, the star campaigner seeks votes in the name of contesting candidate(s) or shares the dais with them, then the rally/meeting expense shall be apportioned to the election expenditure of such candidate(s).
• If the star campaigner incurs boarding/lodging expenses while campaigning for any candidate(s), it shall be included in the expenditure account of such candidate(s) irrespective of whether it is paid for by the candidate(s).
• Further, if any candidate(s) travel with the star campaigner, then 50% of the travel expenditure of the star campaigner shall also be apportioned to such candidate(s).

What are the Concerns Regarding Campaigning by the Star Campaigners?

• The star campaigners of all parties have been found guilty of using inappropriate and abusive words against leaders of other political parties.
  • They were appealing to caste/communal feelings of electors and making unsubstantiated allegations.
• Another issue is with respect to the assessment of expenditure incurred for the rally/meeting of such star campaigners which is always significantly lower than the actual expenditure.
  • This may be due to the rate card used by the EC that does not reflect current market rates for various items.
  • This results in lower apportionment of expenditure to contesting candidates.

What Needs to be Done to Maintain Decorum and Restraint in Campaigning?

• At present, the RP Act stipulates that political parties can appoint or revoke the appointment of star campaigners.
  • As per Article 324 of the Constitution, the EC is the highest authority that has been vested with the powers of superintendence and control of elections.
  • Hence, the law may be amended to authorise the EC to revoke the ‘star campaigner’ status of a leader, in case of any serious violation of Model Code of Conduct.
  • This would hopefully instil a sense of responsibility among them and ensure that campaigns maintain the necessary decorum and restraint.
• Also, the assessment and apportionment of rally/meeting expenses where star campaigners’ campaign for particular candidate(s) should be made more robust.