Climate Change and Human Rights

Since 2007, climate change has officially been considered a threat to the enjoyment of human rights. Its impacts have been observed practically everywhere in the world in the last decades and are expected to grow in both frequency and intensity, bringing about grave harms to the environment. Human beings will be severely affected and many fundamental rights jeopardized. No human right to a safe environment has been articulated to date, but many scholars are convinced such a right would prove an effective instrument to address the human dimension of climate change. Others, however, maintain that human rights and environmental norms inhabit separate and scarcely reconcilable bodies of law. Furthermore, since both mitigation and adaptation measures can jeopardize rights as well as safeguard them, they claim that climate action cannot be identified with human rights protection. This paper addresses both advantages and side effects of adopting a human rights framework for climate change. It concludes that most objections to the adoption of this framework can be addressed and that an international acknowledgment of a human right to a healthy, safe, and clean environment would probably be beneficial.