At the same time, the exercise of human rights such as those to expression, association, public participation and information, help protect rivers and seas.

Thus, the resource persons in the Oxfam TROSA side event, “Improving Business and Human Rights in Transboundary River Basins in South Asia” promote frameworks that seek to protect the environment and human rights at the same time.

Business and South Asia rivers

 Mikayin Lake Photo By: Jacqueline Storey/Oxfam

What are the impacts of businesses on South Asia riverine communities?

To answer this question, Oxfam’s Transboundary Rivers of South Asia (TROSA) programme conducted research in communities along the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) basins in Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India and Nepal, and the Salween River that runs through China, Myanmar and Thailand.

In its June 2020 briefing note, TROSA says, “Unregulated infrastructure developments, unplanned land use practices, climate change, agricultural run-off, poor household waste management practices and increased urbanisation are all serious threats.”

Negative impacts of businesses- from SMEs to large multinationals – include:

• Child labor
• Unsafe working conditions, labor rights abuses and gender discrimination, particularly along supply chains of apparel, agribusiness, and electronics
• Attacks on human rights defenders
• Lack of meaningful consultations with communities affected by extraction of natural resources
• Violations of people’s right to water in sand mining and other businesses by diverting and polluting rivers and other water sources, and restricting community access to them
• Violations of people’s rights to security, food, livelihood, shelter, and public participation when hydropower dams and other large infrastructure projects significantly change the flow of rivers, destroy fisheries, cause loss of productive land, and force the relocation of entire communities
• Violations of people’s right to water due to poor waste management practices and toxics dumping by sugar mills, pulp and paper production, tanneries, textiles and other industries.

To address the above threats to rivers and people’s right to water, TROSA advocates complementary approaches.

First, governments and businesses must meet their respective duties to protect and respect human rights, as well as provide remedies for violations. For these, UNGP on Business and Human Rights, as well as other guidance by the UN Working Group on BHR (such as on gender and corruption) and other international instruments, provide or clarify helpful and practical international standards.

Second, stakeholders must bridge the gap between the right to water, water governance, and BHR. Governments need to ensure that National Action Plans (NAPs) on human rights and BHR focus on water and environmental issues. They also need to apply a human rights lens to environmental assessment and water governance tools, such as the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA).

Read the complete June 2020 TROSA briefing note and research report here.

Plastics and Pacific seas

How can stakeholders – governments, businesses, and civil society communities – reduce land-based and sea-based sources of marine plastic pollution and its negative impacts on health and the environment?

UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the Coordinating Body on the Seas of East Asia (COBSEA)– an intergovernmental group that includes representatives from Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, People’s Republic of China, Republic of the Philippines, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam– propose a human rights-based approach to preventing plastic pollution.

Specifically, the 2019 COBSEA Regional Action Plan on Marine Litter (RAP MaLi) consists of four main actions:

• Action 1: Preventing and reducing marine litter from land-based sources.
• Action 2: Preventing and reducing marine litter from sea-based sources.
• Action 3: Monitoring and assessment of marine litter.
• Action 4: Activities supporting the implementation of COBSEA Regional Action Plan on Marine Litter (RAP MaLi).

COBSEA RAP MaLi 2019 explains the rationale and background to these important major actions:

Marine litter is a transboundary challenge that is rooted in unsustainable production and consumption patterns, poor solid waste management and lack of infrastructure, lack of adequate legal and policy frameworks and poor enforcement, including on interregional cross-border trade of plastic waste, and a lack of financial resources. Marine litter is any persistent, manufactured or processed solid material discarded into the sea or rivers or on beaches; brought indirectly to the sea with rivers, sewage, storm water or winds; or discarded or lost at sea. Marine litter poses environmental, economic, health, aesthetic and cultural threats, including degradation of marine and coastal habitats and ecosystems that incur socioeconomic losses in marine-based sectors.

The majority of the population in the nine East Asian Seas countries lives in coastal areas, contributing to rapid urbanization and the world’s highest concentrations of shipping and fishing vessel activity. Reducing and minimizing regional marine litter from both land-based and sea-based sources requires successfully addressing waste leakage and disposal into rivers, along coastlines, and into the ocean, in the East Asian Seas region. This requires multi-stakeholder engagement across all economic sectors and groups of society to overcome linear systems of production, consumption and disposal, and to tackle marine litter at source and at sea. [emphasis mine]

Read UNEP and COBSEA’s 2019 short issue brief on a human rights-based approach to preventing plastic pollution here and the full text of COBSEA RAP MaLi 2019 here.