Human Rights and Climate Change

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Human Rights and Climate Change

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As the effects of climate change continue to be felt, appreciation of its future transformational impact on numerous areas of public law and policy is set to grow. Among these, human rights concerns are particularly acute. They include forced mass migration, increased disease incidence and strain on healthcare systems, threatened food and water security, the disappearance and degradation of shelter, land, livelihoods and cultures, and the threat of conflict.

This inquiry into the human rights dimensions of climate change looks beyond potential impacts to examine the questions raised by climate change policies: accountability for extraterritorial harms; constructing reliable enforcement mechanisms; assessing redistributional outcomes; and allocating burdens, benefits, rights and duties among perpetrators and victims, both public and private.

The book examines a range of so-far unexplored theoretical and practical concerns that international law and other scholars and policy-framers will find increasingly difficult to ignore.

First collection on the human rights dimensions of climate change, assessing the key public law and policy themes at their intersection
Provides readers with multidisciplinary perspectives
Clear and nontechnical language provides non-specialist readers with an accessible introduction to complex issues

Contents:: Introduction: the human rights dimensions of climate change; Stephen Humphreys; Part I. Rights Perspectives on Global Warming:; 1. Competing justice claims: human rights, climate harms and international disorder; Stephen Humphreys; 2. Climate change, human rights and moral thresholds; Simon Caney; 3. Equitable utilization of the atmosphere: a rights-based approach to climate change?; Dinah Shelton; 4. Climate change, human rights and corporate accountability; Peter Newell; 5. Rethinking human rights: the impact of climate change on the dominant discourse; Sam Adelman; Part II. Priorities, Risks and Inequities in Global Responses:; 6. The Kyoto protocol and vulnerability: equity and human rights dimensions; Philippe Cullet; 7. Forests, climate change and human rights: managing risks and trade-offs; Frances Seymour; 8. Climate change and the right to the highest attainable standard of health; Paul Hunt and Rajat Khosla; 9. Human rights and vulnerability to climate change; Jon Barnett; 10. Climate change, evolution of disasters and inequality; Kye Mesa Barnard and John Mutter; Part III. Conclusion:; 11. Conceiving justice: articulating common causes in parallel regimes; Stephen Humphreys; Appendix: climate change impacts on human rights.