Routledge Handbook of Human Rights and Climate Governance

Sébastien Duyck, Sébastien Jodoin, Alyssa Johl, Sébastien Duyck, Sébastien Jodoin, Alyssa Johl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315312552
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Over the last decade, the world has increasingly grappled with the complex linkages emerging between efforts to combat climate change and to protect human rights around the world. The Paris Climate Agreement adopted in December 2015 recognized the necessity for governments to take into consideration their human rights obligations when taking climate action. However, important gaps remain in understanding how human rights can be used in practice to develop and implement effective and equitable solutions to climate change at multiple levels of governance.

This book brings together leading scholars and practitioners to offer a timely and comprehensive analysis of the opportunities and challenges for integrating human rights in diverse areas and forms of global climate governance. The first half of the book explores how human rights principles and obligations can be used to reconceive climate governance and shape responses to particular aspects of climate change. The second half of the book identifies lessons in the integration of human rights in climate advocacy and governance and sets out future directions in this burgeoning domain.

Featuring a diverse range of contributors and case studies, this Handbook will be an essential resource for students, scholars, practitioners and policy makers with an interest in climate law and governance, human rights and international environmental law.

Part I

Conceptual foundations

1

Integrating human rights in global climate governance

An introduction

Sébastien Duyck, Sébastien Jodoin, and Alyssa Johl

The intersections of human rights and climate change

Over the last decade, the world has increasingly grappled with the complex linkages emerging between efforts to combat climate change and to protect human rights around the world. As is well recognised by several international experts and bodies, climate change has a range of negative implications for the rights to life, food, health, housing, and self-determination, among others, and its consequences will be felt most acutely by groups in vulnerable situations such as Indigenous Peoples, the world’s poor, women, youth, communities located in low-lying regions, and small-island states.¹ At the same time, on-the-ground experience demonstrates that responses to climate change may themselves have negative repercussions for human rights by failing to abide by the participatory rights of marginalised peoples and communities and restricting their access to the lands, food, energy, and resources on which their livelihoods depend.² While the Paris Agreement adopted in December 2015 recognises the necessity for governments to “respect, promote, and consider” their human rights obligations when taking climate action,³ important gaps remain in understanding how human rights can and should be used in practice to develop and implement effective and equitable solutions to climate change.

This book seeks to fill this gap between needs and action by offering a timely and comprehensive analysis of the opportunities and challenges for integrating human rights with climate governance. It builds on nearly a decade of experience in thinking about and working at the intersections of human rights and climate change. The book considers important recent developments in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (Part I) and the United Nations Human Rights System (Part II), documents emerging lessons in the development and implementation of human rights obligations and principles with respect to different issues raised by climate change (Part III), and provides regional case studies of experiences on the ground (Part V).

One of the unique features of this volume is that it brings together scholars and practitioners that have played key roles in studying the relationship between human rights and climate change or in framing climate change as a human rights issue in a range of venues, including multilateral institutions, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and the private sector. Indeed, Part IVof the book features contributions from civil society experts, advocates, and stakeholders who are on the leading edge of building linkages between the fields of climate change and human rights. As a result, the chapters in this book employ and reflect multiple disciplines, approaches, and perspectives. Several chapters are written by social scientists or draw on interdisciplinary research and methods.⁴ Other chapters are written by civil society activists who can speak to the lived realities of fighting for the protection of rights in the context of climate change.⁵ These varied contributions provide the reader with unique and nuanced insights into past, ongoing, and future efforts to enhance the protection of human rights in a changing climate and are of great relevance to the work of scholars, policy-makers, lawyers, activists, and other practitioners working on this dynamic and timely topic.

The remainder of this introductory chapter proceeds as follows. We begin by providing a historical overview of the emergence of human rights in the field of global climate governance. We then identify some of the key themes about the relationship between human rights and climate change that recur throughout the book. We conclude by identifying outstanding questions for scholars writing about human rights and climate change and summarizing key issues and implications for advocacy and policy-making in the future.

The emergence of human rights in the field of global climate governance

The emergence of human rights in the field of climate change is the result of international negotiations and advocacy efforts that extend back to the very origins of the UNFCCC.⁶ During the final stages of drafting the UNFCCC in 1992, the G-77 proposed that it recognise in its article 2 that “the right to development is an inalienable human right. All peoples have an equal right in matters relating to reasonable living standards.”⁷ This language was rejected by the United States, however, as it did not accept the right to development as a human right.⁸ Consequently, this language was abandoned and the UNFCCC instead affirms that “the parties have a right to, and should, promote sustainable development.”⁹ Following the adoption of the UNFCCC, references to human rights all but disappeared from discussions of climate governance, with a few exceptions in the related academic literature continuing to link human rights and equity.¹⁰

In the late 1990s, the negotiations for the operationalisation of the Kyoto Protocol provided the context for the consideration of a second dimension of the interlinkages between climate governance and human rights.¹¹ Indigenous Peoples and their allies opposed the establishment of the clean development mechanism (CDM) to incentivise carbon mitigation projects in developing countries, highlighting among other arguments that such a scheme would support activities that could result in violations of the participatory and substantive rights of Indigenous Peoples.¹² Scholars specifically highlighted that the inclusion of land use and afforestation projects within the scope of the CDM could lead to adverse social implications for Indigenous and forest-dependent communities, if adequate safeguards and accountability measures were not developed.¹³ Unfortunately, the rules adopted by the UNFCCC conference of the parties (COP) for the CDM did not adequately consider these important matters, and many CDM projects have infringed on the human rights of affected populations.¹⁴ Similar concerns have been raised in the context of the voluntary carbon market, where carbon projects have been developed and implemented with little guidance and scrutiny, often with adverse social implications for local communities.¹⁵ Concerns over the negative consequences of climate mitigation projects also resulted in the development of non-governmental certification programmes that set more stringent rules and processes to enhance the social performance of carbon mitigation activities.¹⁶ One such programme, launched in 2003, was the Gold Standard, which included safeguards providing that CDM projects should respect international human rights and labour standards and not be involved or complicit in human rights abuses, involuntary resettlement, or the alteration, damage, or removal of any critical cultural heritage.¹⁷

Indigenous Peoples were again at the forefront of the first campaign demanding that governments consider the human rights implications of climate change.¹⁸ In 2005, Inuit in the Canadian and Alaskan Arctic filed a complaint before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) seeking relief from the United States for alleged violations of their human rights resulting from climate change.¹⁹ Although the IACHR deemed the complaint inadmissible,²⁰ this petition, in combination with the Inuit Circumpolar Council’s advocacy efforts in the UN climate negotiations,²¹ is generally considered to have played a critical role in raising awareness of the human rights dimensions of climate change.²² This landmark case was followed by the 2007 Malé Declaration on the Human Dimension of Global Climate Change adopted by small-island developing states,²³ which called for assistance from the UN Human Rights Council (UNHCR) and the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR) in recognising and assessing the human rights implications of climate change. This marked the beginning of efforts led by small-island developing states and their allies in international organisations and civil society to introduce climate change as a human rights matter in the context of the UN Human Rights System.²⁴

The launch of a new cycle of international negotiations towards a comprehensive climate agreement in 2007 offered an important opportunity to build on the work of UN human rights bodies and experts to introduce human rights considerations, principles, and obligations to the UNFCCC.²⁵ In addition, negative experiences with several CDM projects and efforts to develop a new mechanism to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries (known as REDD+) in turn spurred Indigenous Peoples and non-governmental organisations to advocate for the need to recognise and prevent the adverse human rights implications of climate mitigation activities.²⁶ In the wake of the collapse of the Copenhagen climate talks in 2009, civil society advocacy efforts to frame climate change as a human rights issue intensified in the UNFCCC and other multilateral venues.²⁷ One year later, in the context of the Cancun Agreements, state parties to the UNFCCC recognised, for the first time, several linkages between human rights and climate change. They emphasised that governments should fully respect human rights when taking climate action,²⁸ referenced a resolution from the UNHCR to the effect that climate change has adverse impacts for a range of human rights,²⁹ and developed safeguards for REDD+ that refer to human rights and note the relevance of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.³⁰ These references demonstrated that governments recognised both the adverse human rights impacts of climate change as well as the potentially harmful nature of responses to climate change.³¹

Beyond the UNFCCC, the human rights implications of climate policies and programmes were also increasingly recognised in the extensive array of mechanisms that were established to govern the development and implementation of carbon mitigation programmes and projects in developing countries. In particular, the multilateral, bilateral, and non-governmental initiatives that emerged in the late 2000s to support the pursuit of REDD+ in developing countries has, in various ways and with different levels of effectiveness, integrated several human rights standards and principles.³² As well, building on its experience with REDD+, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) developed soc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part I Conceptual foundations
• Part II International framework
• Part III Early lessons
• Part IV Stakeholder perspectives
• Part V Regional case studies
• Part VI Future directions
• Index