December 2023
Each month, we invite you to learn about the people, the progress, the precedent, and the history-making protection of children’s right to a safe climate powered by Our Children’s Trust.
PEOPLE-POWERED JUSTICE
Meet Kelly Matheson! Kelly first joined our team in 2010 as a partner. Then, from 2015-2021, she served on our Board before joining the staff early last year as our Deputy Director for Global Climate Litigation.
Kelly brings her experience in international human rights, environmental, and criminal law, as well as a visual communications background to our groundbreaking legal efforts.
1. What do you do here at Our Children’s Trust?
As the Deputy Director of Global Climate Litigation, I have the best job! I have the privilege of supporting all our youth-powered work outside the U.S. I also serve as a bridge: I share the lessons we have learned through our U.S. casework with the climate litigation community, and I share the learnings from international cases with our team to ensure our U.S. litigation is even stronger. My favorite part of the job is learning about the science: while the climate crisis is most certainly a crisis, there are solutions if we act fast enough.
2. How did you get involved in climate law/action?
Right after graduating from university, I taught natural science education across the western U.S. In 1995, we invited Tim Ingalsbee—Kelsey Juliana’s dad (Juliana v. U.S.)—to guest instruct a forest and fire ecology course for youth ages 12-14. Tim inspired all of us, inspiring me straight to law school to leverage the law to protect environmental human rights. This was a key fork in the road marking the start of my global adventures.
I first went to Tanzania and worked with Lawyers’ Environmental Action Team to stop the destruction of a river delta that thousands of people depended on for their lives and livelihoods. Other work travels took me to Congo Brazzaville where I spent a year embedded with a public health campaign to protect both gorillas and communities from Ebola. Many more months were spent in places like the Amazon rainforest, the Republic of Guinea, and the Democratic Republic of Congo working with communities to collect visual evidence of environmental crimes and leverage the evidence for justice. The other profound turning point was the time I spent in conflict zones. It became crystal clear that climate change not only exacerbates all the world’s most grave human rights challenges, it also prevents solutions to global crises: conflict, war crimes, involuntary migration, poverty, and global health. This is why I work on climate change.
Kelly and her rescue pups, Charley and Tingo
3. What has been one of your favorite memories or experiences since you joined the team?
During Our Children’s Trust’s (OCT’s) first three years, I worked for an international human rights organization, WITNESS. WITNESS became one of OCT’s very first partners, giving me the greenlight to immerse with OCT’s then very small team. During this time, we also partnered with Montana State University’s MFA in Science and Natural History Filmmaking. Together, we produced ten short films for the series, Stories of TRUST: Calling for Climate Recovery, with OCT’s youth plaintiffs. Spending time with the young human rights activists, in their favorite places, listening to their stories, and supporting them to elevate their voice through film and media will not only be one of my favorite experiences with OCT, but an all-time favorite life experience.
4. What gives you hope?
The thousands of scientists who are committed to letting the world know that, if we act with urgency, we can protect humanity from our greatest human rights challenge. And the judges who take the time to truly grapple with the facts, law, and scientific evidence then issue decisions that could put us on the path to reversing climate change.
5. What is one thing you’d want everyone to know about Our Children’s Trust?
Not everyone knows our history so I would love the world to know that OCT initiated the work to secure a constitutional and human right to a life-sustaining climate system. We did so despite many saying, “It is legally impossible.” And today—just over a decade after we brought our first cases—we locked-in a legal roadmap that lawyers across the globe are following to secure this right in their countries.
learn more about our global youth-led climate litigation
Youth-Powered Justice
This is Kalālapa, one of the 14 youth plaintiffs in Navahine v. Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation, which is headed to trial in Honolulu in less than seven months!
In May, Kalālapa traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, where she shared her experiences as a climate mobilizer with fellow youth climate activists and children’s rights professionals:
Watch as Kalālapa speaks on a panel with a member of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child about the need to be forthright to children regarding the climate crisis, even if it’s scary, so they can face the challenges of their future head-on, including taking action to secure a safe climate.
READ MORE OF KALĀLAPA’S STORY IN OUR 2023 IMPACT REPORT!
Science-Powered Evidence
If you’re paying attention to news about the climate crisis, you may have heard this figure: 1.5°C. In fact, it seems like everyone’s talking about it and how we need to limit our planet’s average global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial temperatures.
But there’s a big problem: 1.5°C isn’t safe.
“The Truth About 1.5°C “
Watch our three-minute animation to learn more about the myth of 1.5°C, including what climate scientists say we need to do instead to end the climate crisis (also available with captions):
Finally, on December 15th, join members of our staff for Powering Youth Climate Justice --- an intimate review of 2023, our latest news, and how we will power forward in 2024.
register for powering youth climate justice on december 15th
democracy-powered trust
Fighting climate change depends upon people around the world leading all sorts of actions – from protest to legislation to litigation. Our Children’s Trust is powered by hundreds of communities and global partners across the climate movement.
Together with Oxfam, we work to secure and protect the rights of young people around the planet:
1. How does Oxfam protect climate rights globally?
Oxfam advocates for climate action to protect the human rights and livelihoods of people least equipped to deal with the climate crisis. We fight for wealthy nations like the United States to rapidly phase out fossil fuels, to help frontline communities with the fewest resources recover from catastrophic climate impacts, and to provide funding for climate action in lower-income countries. We pressure big companies to reduce pollution and to stop exploiting communities that possess natural resources. We call out “carbon billionaires” for propping up polluting industries, and we demand stronger taxation on their wealth and dirty investments.
We believe a just and feminist energy transition reduces inequality, shifting the costs of climate action onto wealthy polluters while prioritizing economic, racial, and gender justice. We champion climate solutions from communities of color, human rights defenders, and women’s rights groups that have intimate knowledge of our environment and of the devastating impacts of climate change. We work with small-scale farmers, pastoralists, and fisherfolk to restore fragile ecosystems, build new livelihoods, and adopt agricultural practices in harmony with nature. We lift up the voices and stories of Indigenous Peoples and women land defenders so that policymakers better understand the impacts of fossil fuel extraction and industrial food production on our climate and human rights.
We also work with local communities to build resilience in the face of the climate crisis. For example, in northern Ethiopia we introduced a micro-insurance scheme for smallholder farmers to safeguard against hunger in light of increasingly frequent and severe droughts. We also respond to climate related emergencies around the globe. Last year, we provided humanitarian assistance to hundreds of thousands of people caught in deadly floods, storms, and droughts.
2. How and why do you partner with Our Children’s Trust and the young people we represent?
We partner with Our Children’s Trust by supporting their critical legal efforts to ensure that governments recognize and respect youths’ rights to life, dignity, and a healthy environment. In support of Our Children’s Trust’s efforts to fight on behalf of youth in the U.S., Oxfam has drafted an amicus brief outlining the destructive impact that climate change has had on our humanitarian operations. We have also been honored to co-author amicus briefs with Our Children’s Trust to some of the world’s most influential tribunals – including the European Court of Human Rights and the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea – urging decision-makers to reference modern scientific standards when articulating state obligations to protect human rights and respect international treaties.
We partner with Our Children’s Trust because of their fearless and effective advocacy efforts to amplify the voices of the world’s youth, a demographic that traditionally does not enjoy equal access to power. Given that youth will disproportionately shoulder the burdens wrought by climate change, vindicating their rights to a healthy environment is of paramount importance. Our Children’s Trust’s deep legal and scientific expertise uniquely positions it as a leading champion of youths’ right to a safe climate.
3. What personally inspires you to take climate action?
Climate change poses an existential threat to humanity. The world, and all the people and living creatures on it, simply cannot survive if we do not take immediate and urgent action to stem the tide of global warming, and the myriad catastrophic events that will accompany it. Personally, I am inspired to take climate action because I do not want our generation’s failures to condemn the next generation to lives dominated by the constant dangers of natural disasters, or to doom people living in low-income or marginalized communities to fates like forced migration or famine. We have no time to lose.
