05/09/2025 Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development
The Committee on Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development notes with grave concern that Europe has entered an era in which climate-related disasters are becoming structural: persistent droughts, unprecedented wildfires, and heatwaves that strike the most vulnerable and already compromise the fundamental rights of millions of citizens. Landscapes, agriculture, infrastructure, and public health are being durably affected. The committee express its support and solidarity with the Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, and Turkish populations who have been victims of the devastating wildfires this summer.
These events are no longer isolated warnings but proven damages that will weigh even more heavily on future generations. The urgency is therefore not only environmental: it is also social, health-related, economic, and democratic.
In this context, the committee recalls the commitments made by the Council of Europe in Reykjavik and stresses the need to translate the announced environmental strategy into concrete actions. The adoption of a binding legal instrument remains indispensable to guarantee citizens a safe and viable environment.
Recent legal developments confirm this requirement. In its advisory opinion of 23 July 2025, the International Court of Justice affirmed that States have clear legal obligations to prevent and mitigate climate change, and that inaction may incur their international responsibility. Likewise, in its landmark judgment Verein Klimaseniorinnen Schweiz v. Switzerland (April 2024), the European Court of Human Rights established that insufficient action constitutes a violation of human rights and requires compliance with carbon budgets consistent with scientific evidence.
The committee therefore calls on the Council of Europe to assume its central role in addressing the greatest contemporary threat: climate change and its impact on our fundamental rights. It must adopt a binding legal instrument to guarantee the right to a healthy environment, implement the environmental strategy supported by an intergovernmental committee, and ensure the full and rigourous implementation of the Court’s judgments in this field.