Climate Change & Human Rights: Why We Should Be Worried

Published in

The Climate Series

11 min readMay 25, 2018

How Anthropogenic Climate Change Violates Basic Human Rights, and What We Ought to Do about It

A graphic depicting the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change.

Introduction. Discussions about the implications of climate change typically center around economics, resource conservation, and public policy — a less-discussed topic is how the consequences of climate change bear on the moral arena of human rights. What follows is an account of how anthropogenic climate change violates the basic human rights to life, physical security, subsistence, and health of current and future generations, and the action we are morally obligated to take to remedy it.

Background

First: let us establish a working framework through which to understand human rights. A right implies both rectitude (moral correctness) and entitlement (one is entitled to X). Rights typically go unmentioned unless they are violated, which should be the norm.

Political theorist Jack Donnelly calls such a norm “objective enjoyment” — when a right is enjoyed and not given any thought by either the right-holder or person guaranteeing it (i.e. a customer wouldn’t think about his right to not have credit card stolen by the cashier when buying groceries).

Objective enjoyment exists in contrast to a right-holder having to exercise a right against threats to deprive him of it (for example, demanding the right to breathe fresh air against a factory polluting the air with smog).

Human rights are not merely those needed for life, but for a life worthy of a human being. Possessing a human right to X implies that enjoying X will allow a person to live a more fully human and dignified life. Thus, I define human rights as: 1) the minimum set of goods, services and protections needed for a life of dignity and 2) a set of practices to realize those goods, services and protections.

In general, human rights are grounded in human needs, from which certain obligations to protect those rights follow. Our fundamental human needs for life, physical security, subsistence, and health provide grounds for basic human rights to those things. A duty to protect from violating those rights follows.

I will now turn to a framework for discussing anthropogenic climate change: long-term changes in the statistics of global climate patterns since the mid-twentieth century as a result of human causes. Climate change, which has a wide range of far-reaching, potentially catastrophic effects, is primarily a product of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the past three quarters of a century. The literature is uncontroversial: in fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated that it is very likely (that is, a more than 90% probability) that human GHG emissions are the source of anthropogenic climate change. The effects of climate change are wide-ranging, and include: escalating global temperatures; an increase in extreme weather events like floods, storms, fires, and droughts; rising sea levels; heat waves and heat stress; the spread of warm-weather pests and diseases; and decreased availability of food and water resources, among others.

Climate Change as a Threat to Human Rights

Now that we’ve laid the framework for discussion, we’ll explore how climate change is a violation of basic human rights. We’ve established that, by virtue of one’s being human, one has rights to life, physical security, subsistence, and health. The IPCC has stated with very high confidence that climate change currently contributes to the global burden of disease, injuries, and premature deaths.

Lives can be cut short — or made less “fully human” and dignified — by malnutrition, illness, water stress, heat waves, flooding, extreme storms, heat waves, flooding, water shortages, hunger, floods, and forced eviction from coastal regions.

Thus, the basic human rights to life, food, health, water, and physical security are violated. Getting at the economic injustice climate change wreaks, philosopher Tim Hayward has argued that those most adversely affected by climate change (namely, the poor) have their right to a fair share of the planet’s natural resources and environmental services violated by the developing world using more than its fair share. The IPCC states with high confidence that, in the foreseeable future, the health status of millions of people will be impacted by an increase in malnutrition, deaths, diseases, injury due to extreme weather events, the burden of diarrheal diseases, and the spread of infectious diseases. I believe that, if climate change violates the basic human rights to life, physical security, subsistence, and health of current and future generations, we are morally obligated to work to remedy it.

The Moral Status of Future Generations

Acommon objection to this argument is the claim that future persons are not entitled to rights in the present, so we cannot be currently violate them. This claim is misguided in a number of ways. First, the measures we take now to protect the rights of current people will overlap with what we would be doing in the future to protect future people once they exist. I support an even stronger claim: right now, we are violating the present rights of future persons. We are confident that there will exist some humans in the future (in the absence of catastrophe), and, although we don’t know their exact identity, we know that they have humanity, and are therefore owed basic human rights. Most would consider it unethical to, for example, set up a booby trap in which a future person would fall to his death, even if the person who designed it was unaware of the identity of the future person, or built the trap before the future person was born. By virtue of our membership to the human race, we have current duties to protect basic human rights that actual people will have in the future.

Even though we cannot identify with certainty the exact harms that future people will incur or the exact identity of the future people who will incur them, a lack of certainty does not absolve us of our duties to the future of humankind.

We know that anthropogenic climate change greatly increases the risk of harmful, human rights-violating events occurring, and with this knowledge comes a duty. Ethics theorist Henry Shue argues that a right implies a social guarantee against threats to it. Acknowledging that we cannot protect human rights against all threats at all times, Shue claims that we should protect against threats that are a) predictable and b) remediable. We know, from a decade of reports by the most trusted, knowledgeable Climate Change-science organization in the world (the IPCC) that climate change fits these criteria: it is both predicted and able to remedied (through a reduction in GHG emissions).

Human rights are dynamic, which means that threats to human rights — and duties to protect them — change over time. As threats evolve, our conception of human rights, and how to defend them, must shift accordingly. The human rights violated by climate change (rights to health, security, and subsistence) are not new, but climate change is a new threat that requires new duties to protect them.

What Now? Our Moral Obligations

The new duties we have will take a few forms. We know, currently, that, if given the choice, many individuals will not act to reduce future climate change, which will violate human rights. If we take future human rights seriously, and we know the nature of current individuals, we should have a general duty to promote institutions that ensure the protection of human rights against the threats posed by GHG emissions. Ultimately, we would hope that intergovernmental organizations — like the United Nations — would make these sorts of binding mandates, or national governments would come together in agreements like the Kyoto Protocol or the Paris Climate Accords. However, when national governments (like that of the United States) exit — or refuse to agree to — agreements like the Paris Climate Accords, support for institutions promoting human rights should manifest itself in support for international environmental organizations seeking to influence climate policy, like Greenpeace, Conservation International, and the World Wide Fund for Nature.

We are, however, obligated to something beyond just a general duty to promote institutions promoting human rights.

We’re committed to something greater: to rectify both the wrong done by noncompliance with the general duty and the disparity between contributors to climate change and those most adversely affected by it.

The vast majority of anthropogenic GHG emissions have come from developed nations, who were advantaged by their hefty GHG emissions, through an increase in national wealth and a higher standard of living. On the other hand, poorer countries (primarily regions on the developing world in Africa, South America, and parts of Asia) have experienced the most devastating effects of climate change thus far (malnutrition, the spread of disease, food and water shortages, etc.) which they not only did not cause, but lack the adequate resources to deal with. Thus, those who have contributed more to climate change should have more burdensome duties for rectifying its consequences (like larger constraints on GHG emissions and paying for a larger portion of adaptation measures.) Such a change should be feasible without significantly reducing the rights of these nations’ citizens, because they possess much more monetary resources to begin with.

Second, beyond the general duty, we have a duty to not accept benefits resulting from actions that violate human rights (i.e. noncompliance with the general duty, and unreasonable levels of GHG emissions.) Much of the injustice of climate change derives from the fact that those who caused it reaped the benefits of their contribution, and so we have a duty to prevent this from happening in the future. This not only implies compliance with effective institutions once they’re in place, but individual action to reduce personal GHG levels to a reasonable level before institutional requirements are set.

An objection to the requirement of duty is that it is too demanding, and that the costs (especially to protect future generations) are too high. This brings us to what Shue renders the main task in defending any right: answering the objection that the duties involved ask too much of others. In response, I offer a moral dictate: judgement about human rights cannot be reduced to economic calculations and cost-benefit analyses.

If we value human rights, we should aim our climate change policy at protecting human rights rather than maximizing welfare. Crafting climate change policy is about making a moral judgement about where to allocate resources: toward providing for the basic rights of the future poor, or toward maximizing the preference satisfaction and standard of living of the current wealthy.

From a moral standpoint, I believe that protecting the basic human rights of future generations should be prioritized over guaranteeing the preference satisfaction of current generations (through unbridled consumption and pollution). It’s reasonable to believe that allocating resources first to the former and then to the latter would not pose much of a threat to the way of life — and rights — of current people in developed nations.

Because inhabitants of developed nations have a greater capability to reduce their carbon footprint without significantly reducing their standard of living, they ought to. Henry Shue makes this point in his essay “Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions,” in which he explains the distinction between GHG emissions made merely to provide for basic rights (in developing countries) and emissions made to enable a life of luxury (in wealthy, developed nations). Our moral intuitions on this steer us in the right direction: everyone is entitled to survival emissions. A useful framework to apply is that of Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The theory is: a person’s basic physiological needs to health, food, and subsistence must be provided for before any other sort of fulfillment or desire-gratification can be achieved.

This theory can inform an attitude toward global GHG emissions: we should provide for the lower-level needs of the Global South before the high-tier desires of the rich. By levying taxes on the wealthiest of the global population, we can fund climate change mitigation efforts without dampening the way of life of those funding it. The richest 1% of the global population currently owns 40% of our global assets. A mere 1.5% annual tax on this demographic would cover the cost of climate change mitigation to protect human rights without significantly reducing the rights of those paying for it. Currently, the U.S. is one of a few large, industrialized nations that does not enforce a climate tax, which would discourage large-scale GHG emissions by high-polluting companies like Exxon Mobil, Shell, and BP, reduce the havoc wreaked by climate change in the developing world, and have little — if any — effect on the lifestyle (let alone the “rights”) of U.S. oil consumers.

One might object that forcing states to change their cultural practices in an effort to mitigate climate change would be wrong, but this must be weighed against the Third World human rights at stake. For example, what if offshore drilling is a means of cultural expression for people in the U.S. and stopping it would impede our cultural freedom? Applying a Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs framework, a Ghanaian’s right to fresh drinking water trumps an American’s “right” to express his culture by supporting Exxon drilling off the coast of Texas.

Ihave now provided a framework for understanding human rights — and the duties that follow from them — an explanation of the causes and consequences of anthropogenic climate change, and how it necessarily violates fundamental human rights (specifically, the rights to life, physical safety, subsistence, and health). I have explained our current obligations that this violation entails: namely, the duties to promote institutions protecting rights; to rectify the injustice of climate change thus far; and to avoid benefitting from actions that violate the human rights of future generations. I have defended this view against objections that future people lack rights in the present, and that the duties required to remedy climate change are too burdensome and costly.

In sum, anthropogenic climate change does (and, if unchecked, will continue to) violate fundamental human rights, but we can — and must, as members of the human race who value the future of our species — act to remedy it.