Climate Change and Human Rights: Creating Norms to Govern Earth's Atmosphere

Abstract

Global climate change is one of the most pressing threats to humanity in the 21st century. Not only is evidence of this warming unequivocal, scientific consensus holds that it is the result of human activity. If left unchecked, climate change will result in, at best, serious harms to many and, at worst, catastrophic harms to all. In the face of this threat, the international community has failed to agree on a set of norms for addressing the problem. This stalemate centers on three general questions: (1) What is the harm brought by climate change?; (2) Who is responsible?; and (3) What are the obligations borne by responsible parties?

My dissertation answers these questions, offering an alternative to current attempts from legal and philosophical frameworks. Finding current legal structures limiting, my discussion operates primarily in the moral domain. I focus on "rights-based approaches" rather than approaches premised on principles of distributive justice, what I call "equity-based approaches." The human rights framework I provide grounds human rights in the Capabilities Approach, which has been used extensively in development literature. This allows my argument to employ a vocabulary more sensitive to individual vulnerabilities and geographical diversity, while moving beyond mere material or economic provision.

In addressing the primary issues of harm and responsibility vis-à-vis climate change, my argument goes as follows. Following an introductory discussion of the problems posed by climate change, the politics of the divide between the Global North and Global South on climate policy, and existing philosophical approaches, I offer an argument for an interest-based account of human rights grounded in the Capabilities Approach. Using recent work by Breena Holland, I argue that this approach yields a right to a functioning and sustainable environment. Applying this framework, I argue that the impacts of unabated climate change clearly violate this right. Additionally, I defend the claim that this discussion applies to both current and future generations.

Having addressed the harm of climate change, I offer an examination of the resulting responsibility and obligations. Highlighting the nature of climate change as an "aggregative harm," I note the difficulties involved in applying typical individual and collectivist paradigms for moral responsibility to the case of climate change. Drawing from Tracy Isaacs's work on responsibility in collective contexts and focusing on forward looking obligations, I argue for a four-fold taxonomy of differentiated responsibility: (1) the obligations of states; (2) the obligations of non-state collectives (e.g. corporations, NGOs); (3) the obligations of individuals as citizens; and (4) the obligations of individuals as members of the private sphere. These distinctions allow us to hold individuals morally accountable while still recognizing as primary the need for collective action.