Holding leaders accountable for climate deaths

EVERY summer brings new headlines of heat waves, floods and storms. Behind the images are millions of farmers forced off their land, children with chronic illnesses, whole communities displaced and premature deaths that public-health experts link to warming and pollution. The World Health Organization and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warn that the health toll will worsen unless fossil-fuel emissions are cut fast. Yet our legal and political language still treats these outcomes as foreseeable side effects of policy and profit, not as potential crimes. That gap between human suffering and accountability is a moral failing and…