• Human security

Human security

This report discusses a spectrum of human rights concerns raised by anthropogenic climate change and by the strategies devised to address it. It pinpoints areas where climate change will have direct and indirect human rights impacts, and where human rights principles might sharpen policy-making on climate change, including in the two core policy areas of adaptation (preparing for the unavoidable and foreseeable effects of climate change) and mitigation (reducing GHG emissions in order to curb climate change).

Intended primarily as a mapping exercise, the report lays out a range of research agendas that deserve greater attention than they can be given here. It also assesses the adequacy of human rights conceptions and processes to the larger justice concerns climate change raises. Although human rights considerations arise throughout climate change policy, the report suggests that human rights applications will be most useful if they are narrowly tailored to specific problems.

Noted points from the conclusion include:

• climate change throws up significant questions of justice and distribution that do not sit easily within the existing human rights framework. However, human rights imperatives might help generate some forward momentum by returning a policy focus to the human suffering that climate change is causing and will continue to cause; it can also provide clarity and direction by recognising the moral link between local causes and distant effects
• the special responsibility of wealthy countries to mitigate climate change remains – and is widely accepted. In practice this requires not just cutting emissions at home, but aiding in the timely delivery of adaptation solutions abroad
• human rights thresholds (defined as minimum acceptable levels of protection) would clarify assessment of threats to basic social rights – water and food security, exposure to diseases, access to housing, shelter and land, availability of resources on which livelihoods depend

Finally, it is highlighted that if conditions are to be created to control climate change and foster a sustainable world for everyone - including those most at risk – states everywhere will need to accept and actively implement mutual obligations that go well beyond the narrow ambit of many current negotiating positions. In doing so, it is asserted that they will need to remain attentive to their own obligations, to the development and human rights needs of the people whose lives climate change will affect most, and to the incidental and accidental regulatory failures that have left too many individuals exposed to date.

 

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