Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Flavia Pansieri described how climate change undercuts rights to health, food, water and sanitation.
She also highlighted the impending humanitarian disaster faced by millions of people in Pacific island states.
She said that their rights to housing and even basic citizenship were threatened as rising sea levels pushed them not only from their homes, but into a stateless no-man's land too.
"Environmental disasters nowadays displace more people than wars do." Stressing that it was only a matter of decades before islands such as Kiribati and Tuvalu disappeared beneath the waves, Deputy High Commissioner Pansieri said it wasn't "just a matter of packing up and moving elsewhere" for affected communities.
That's because government buildings, courts, hospitals and schools will vanish too, she said, meaning that these "climate change refugees" risked becoming stateless unless they could convince other governments to give them passports, welfare and protection.
Source: QNA