A/79/177 for survivors of gender-based violence; to prioritize access to safe abortion; 196 and to take additional steps to ensure that refugees, stateless persons asylum -seekers and undocumented migrants, given their vulnerable legal status, have access to affordable and quality sexual and reproductive information, goods and health services. 197 92. Humanitarian and human rights law entitles sex workers to receive humanitarian assistance free from discrimination. Yet all too often, criminalization, stigmatization, and policies that conflate consensual sex work with trafficking, exploitation and abuse, only reinforce harmful stereotypes and narratives that impede sex workers’ access to health goods and services. Conflict and emergency implications combined with the systemic exclusion of sex workers thus reinforce the need for the decriminalization and destigmatization of sex work, along with the need to provide support for sex work organizations, in order to address trafficking, exploitation and abuse. 198 93. Climate change is the greatest health threat confronting humanity. 199 Along with pollution and the loss of biodiversity, climate change constitutes an existential threat to the health of the planet and all life on earth, often referred to as the triple planetary crisis. 200 While some of the effects of climate change are already tangible, more profound and potentially devastating impacts are foreseeable unless urgent coordinated action is taken on a global scale. While the disruptions of climate change may be related to extreme weather events, for instance extreme drought or flooding causing displacement or malnutrition; 201 climate change also drives slow-onset events, such as desertification, rising temperatures, the loss of biodiversity, land and forest degradation, glacial retreat and related impacts, ocean acidification, sea -level rise and salinization. 202 Climate change will have effects on physical and mental health, increasing morbidity and mortality as a result of a surge in the number of communicable and non-communicable diseases 203 in communities and regions that are already disadvantaged, thereby deepening pre-existing inequalities and marginalization. 204 In this context, mitigation and adaptation measures that prioritize those more at risk through using an intersectional and decolonial approach are fundamental to building substantive equality. VIII. Harm reduction and universal health coverage 94. Sustainable Development Goal target 3.8 contains a call for Member States to achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and __________________ 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 24-13226 Ibid. See E/C.12/CZE/CO/2; E/C.12/SVK/CO/3; and CEDAW/C/LTU/CO/4. Global Network of Sex Work Projects, “Sex workers in conflict zones and humanitarian crises”, March 2024. WHO, COP26 Special Report on Climate Change and Health: The Health Argument for Climate Action (Geneva, 2021), p. 2. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, “What is the triple planetary crisis?”, blog, 13 April 2022. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability – Working Group II Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 1074 and 1076. See https://unfccc.int/process/bodies/constituted-bodies/WIMExCom/SOEs. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2022, p. 1048. WHO, “Climate change”; and Céline Guivarch, Nicolas Taconet and Aurélie Méjean, “Linking climate and inequality”, International Monetary Fund: Finance and Development Magazine, September 2021. 21/28