This paper provides an overview of The Declaration on Human Rights and Climate Change and describes how sources from multiple disciplines support the central principles of the Declaration. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the moral case for the Declaration and to highlight the legal and political precedents upon which it is based.
The Declaration on Human Rights and Climate Change was developed in 2015-2016 as a regulating tool to support initiatives focusing on alternative climate futures. The drafters of the Declaration worked from the premise that human rights are intrinsically threatened by climate change and were concerned about the slight attention given to human rights in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Members of the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment developed the Declaration with input from scholars and communities across the world, including Indigenous communities. The Declaration promotes a rights-based approach to climate change and climate justice and intentionally seeks to integrate Western and non-Western beliefs and values.
One of the key aims of the Declaration is to rectify unevenly distributed vulnerabilities and climate injustices. Groups more vulnerable to the negative effects of climate change include women, children, Indigenous people, people in developing countries, and people living in poverty. The predicted effects of climate change place children in an especially vulnerable position, as children disproportionately suffer the health burdens of environmental stressors, such as food scarcity, a lack of clean water, and family displacement.
The argument for the Declaration is presented in four sections of this paper. The first section addresses intra-generational equity and describes how anthropogenic (human caused) climate change intensifies existing and future injustices and inequalities. The second section focuses on inter-generational equity and discusses how the threats posed by climate change infringes on the rights of future generations. The third section addresses the rights of non-human entities and argues that humans have duties as stewards of nature and other living beings. The fourth section addresses the issue of direct responsibility and its application in international human rights law to nation states, corporations and non-state entities.
Climate change is more than a technical or scientific problem; it is a profound crisis of human hierarchies with uneven distributions of vulnerability. The Declaration issues an important call to recognize and respond to the differential imposition of the negative effects of climate change on humans, non-human living beings and systems, and the Earth-system itself.
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