Human Rights and Climate Change: a Fresh Perspective

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by Karen Elizabeth McNamara

Climate change has been considered under many lenses - economic, geopolitical, diplomatic and developmental. However, human rights are rarely considered.

Instead, they are a peripheral concern for the diplomats, researchers and policy-makers working in the climate change field. This is a major oversight.

Last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its Fifth Assessment Report, recognised it is now beyond doubt that the global climate system is warming as a result of greenhouse gas emissions.

How is climate change affecting the basic right of people to sustain their livelihoods across the planet?

Climate change may bring sea level rise, increasing extreme weather such as flooding and drought, unpredictable seasons, the increasing spread of both water and vector borne diseases, greater water shortages and rising concerns over food security.

All of these gravely threaten people’s human rights: access to safe and adequate food and water, and the rights to information, justice, security, and culture.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, along with the eight international and legally-binding human rights conventions, protect human rights.

For instance, the right to livelihoods and subsistence is enshrined in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in Article 25, which states that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services”. This makes clear that people should not be deprived of their livelihood.

In 2008 the United Nations Human Rights Council said climate change “poses an immediate and far-reaching threat to people and communities around the world”.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner began a study of the relationship between human rights and climate change, and in 2009 a subsequent resolution was adopted, stipulating that “climate change-related impacts have a range of implications, both direct and indirect, for the effective enjoyment of human rights”.

Climate change’s threat to human rights is recognised, but this has not yet been translated into global or local policy.

At the Cancun Conference of the Parties (to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) in 2010, the final documents called on member countries to respect and uphold human rights in all climate change-related policies and decisions.

At the most recent Conference of the Parties (in Doha in late 2012), no in-roads were made in utilising the sentiments and language from the Cancun Agreements. This was a missed opportunity.

The impacts of climate change are set to undermine the protection of human rights, especially in countries where there is a very real concern over their long-term viability and sustainability.

The human rights to survival, self-determination, culture and nationality therefore becomes an appropriate lens by which to understand and respond to the impacts of climate change.

Australia is a signatory to the major international human rights conventions. As such, it is obliged to protect the human rights of all people. Climate change is a key threat to the enjoyment of many of these human rights.

If the government here in Australia was to take the human rights implications of climate change seriously they would act with urgency at international negotiations to cut global emissions and encourage other countries to follow suit.

National mitigation targets would be bold and implemented. The government would provide more finance to allow developing counties to adapt to climate change, prepare for extreme weather events and switch to low-carbon technologies and economies.

Australia would also have to make some important changes to domestic law. While Australia might be a signatory to the major international human rights instruments, we have only enacted some human rights norms.

A number of human rights have yet to be enshrined into domestic law - many of which are under threat from the impacts of climate change.

To date, climate change work has been concentrated at the global level - global economy, global solutions and global frameworks, with a focus on technical, economic, environmental and developmental aspects.

Human rights should be placed at the centre of international climate change policy and discussions.

The global community has a moral and legal obligation to uphold and protect human rights. With climate change set to undermine such rights across the planet, it is time that such principles and foundations for life are placed at the centre of international climate change policy, and elsewhere.

Karen Elizabeth McNamara does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.


This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

Fixing Climate Change: The Future Isn't What it Used to be

Adaptation (Ya.Donavanik)

by David Hodgkinson, University of Western Australia

This is the last part of a series following on from the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report and looking at emerging alternatives to the UN climate agreement process.

State based action and sectoral agreements show some promise in dealing with aspects of climate change.

But from humanity’s climate change experience to date and its failure to address the climate change problem through a global agreement, it’s safe to suggest we are headed for trouble.

Given our current path on generating and dealing with emissions, here are my predictions for the future of climate change and climate change action.

Individual action doesn’t and won’t matter

Much has been made of individual action as a means of dealing with the climate change problem, but what one does personally doesn’t on its own make the least bit of difference.

Put another way, the things individuals do in their daily lives, taken by themselves, have no effect. The planet doesn’t notice. It is collective action that matters, or what several billion people do.

Environmental economis Gernot Wagner argues that “[t]he changes necessary are so large and so profound that they are beyond the reach of individual action”.

Instead, what is required is policy that motivates individuals and major industrial sectors to reduce emissions and use resources more efficiently. In any event, there is nothing to indicate that our behaviour is changing; if anything, it’s “business as usual”.

Policy focus will eventually be on adaptation

Climate change mitigation involves reducing emissions through, for example, price-based mechanisms like emissions trading. Climate change adaptation means coping with or adjusting to climate change.

With mitigation, adaptation becomes easier (and they are not alternatives). Together with mitigation, policies focused on adaptation are required, to make adjustments to the unavoidable changes that we now face.

The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and others have suggested that achieving a limit of 2C global warming above pre-industrial levels may be impossible. This raises the possibility of global temperature rises of 4C this century.

This could result, as the Royal Society says, in the “collapse of systems or require transformational adaptation out of systems, as we understand them today”.

The world’s failure to mitigate, the potential severity of impacts, and the challenges (behavioural, societal, economic) in dealing with such failure and such impacts, all argue for renewed efforts on adaptation.

There will be ‘ever more people’

David Attenborough asks us to make a list of all of the environmental problems which afflict the planet - climate change, desertification, famine, loss of rainforest, collapse of fish stocks, shortage of arable land, and so on.

He argues that these problems share one underlying cause: all of these problems become “more difficult - and ultimately impossible - to solve with ever more people”.

The UN estimates (with qualification) that the world’s population will reach 10 billion and climbing by 2100. If families, on average, have half a child more than the UN projects, population will reach 16 billion by 2100.

In Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals, statistician Paul Murtagh and others argue that a person’s reproductive choices must be considered together with his or her everyday activities to work out that person’s impact on the global environment. And it’s difficult to take issue with the view that the decision to have a child is an ethical decision.

Ethics also underpin any market-based approach to population control - how about “tradeable procreation credits”, for example, for buying and selling the right to have children?

Market-based mechanisms - emissions trading schemes - are in vogue as a means to address the climate change problem. Why not use such mechanisms to address the population problem?

Perhaps, though, if having children is, as philosopher Michael Sandel says, “a central aspect of human flourishing, then it’s unfair to condition access to this good on the ability to pay”.

Growing global population amplifies a range of other threats, and they are all related to climate change: resource scarcity, for example, and the energy crisis. And energy of course goes to the heart of the climate change problem.

There will never be ‘enough stuff’

UCLA’s Laurence Smith poses this question:

What if you could play God and do the ethically fair thing by converting the entire developing world’s level of material consumption to that now carried out by North Americans, Western Europeans, Japanese, and Australians today?

Would you?

The world Smith depicts would be frightening. Consumption globally would rise elevenfold. Where would all that meat, fish, water, energy, plastic, metal, and wood come from in a carbon/climate-constrained world?

Suppose, though, that such conversion takes place gradually over the next 40 years. If demographers’ estimate that world population might stabilise at about 9.2 billion by 2050, and if the ultimate objective is for everyone on Earth to live like the developed world, we will need enough stuff to support the equivalent of 105 billion people.

Such a world is completely unsustainable - yet it is, as Smith points out, the “end goal implicit in nearly all prevailing policy”.

This is the ‘age of the Anthropocene’ and will be the end of the wild

Fully 80% of the world’s land surface (excluding Antarctica) is directly influenced by human activities.

More than a decade ago, Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen suggested we were living in the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch inadvertently brought on by the influence of human activity and behaviour on the Earth’s atmosphere.

Further, studies suggest that Earth’s creatures are on the brink of a sixth mass extinction. Perhaps three-quarters of animal species will vanish within 300 years.

This leads MIT’s Stephen Meyer to refer to the “end of the wild” and to conclude that “the extinction crisis … is over, and we have lost”.

Two alternative conclusions

The optimist is comforted by humanity’s ability to come up with solutions.

As Brian Schmidt, the Australian winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics, said (though not in the context of climate change), “Humanity is remarkably clever at figuring out how to do things that are not obviously possible”.

But Stephen Emmott, Head of Computational Science at Microsoft Research, may be more accurate when he says in his book 10 Billion, “I think we’re fucked”.

Part one of this series is here and part two is here.

David Hodgkinson does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.


This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.