Climate Justice and the Right to Health – A Special Issue
Health and Human Rights, Volume 16, Issue 1, http://www.hhrjournal.org/
Foreword
Mary Robinson, Former President of Ireland and President of the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice. President of the Mary Robinson Foundation-Climate Justice
Excerpt
…In recent years, climate justice is emerging as a discipline that addresses the interlinked challenges of climate change, human rights, and development. At a time when the need for multidisciplinary research is gaining ground, climate justice provides a useful framing for interdisciplinary collaborations.
Climate justice highlights the impacts of climate change on the vulnerable, marginalized, and poor, who are disproportionally affected by extreme weather events, such as floods, storms, and droughts, and slow onset events, such as sea level rise and glacial melt. They are the people who have their homes destroyed, face increasing struggles to feed themselves and their families, and are more susceptible to diseases while having their access to health care diminished.
Climate change is already undermining many of their basic human rights—to food and water, to shelter and health. Climate justice points out that the undermining of these essential rights is an injustice—largely because those who are most affected by the negative impacts are least responsible for the causes of the problem. The concept shows how global develop¬ment issues and climate change are inextricably linked, as for example when the incidence of a disease like malaria, that we have been making progress on eradicating, starts to rise again due to climatic changes….
…Articles in this special issue examine the disproportionate impacts of climate change on vulnerable groups, including indigenous peoples. A case is made for climate change mitigation policies informed by human rights and with clear health and equity co-benefits. The links between climate justice and the right to health are presented, including an analysis of the links between the right to food and the right to health in the context on increasing dependency on food aid of low nutritional value. Several papers present a strong case for human rights law guiding procedural responses to climate change and its negative impacts on health….
…It is important at this juncture, with two international processes working on issues of human development and climate change coming to conclusion in 2015, that the value of a climate justice approach is demonstrated and used to inform these policy frameworks. This special edition is a welcome contribution to this endeavor.
Editorial: The Great Procrastination
Jay Lemery, MD, co-editor of this special issue on climate justice, is Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora, Colorado, and President, Wilderness Medical Society.
Carmel Williams, PhD, is the Executive Editor of the Health and Human Rights Journal and a Fellow of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard University
Paul Farmer, MD, PhD, is Editor-in-Chief of the Health and Human Rights Journal, Kolokotrones University Professor at Harvard Univer¬sity, and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
We wonder, given the evidence underlying the mounting climate crisis, if future gener¬ations will regard ours—amongst the epochs of history—as “The Great Procrastination.” Squandering time, dithering on action, and engaging in half-measures woefully incapable of addressing a threat that our best science warns will be more catastrophic and less reversible each year.
The health effects of anthropogenic climate change are increasingly apparent and acceler-ating at an ominous pace. Global warming will now continue under all future scenarios, and immediate action can only slow, not reverse, the rate of warming. Our risk assessment has yet to translate into meaningful mitigation and, even with this knowledge, major industrial nations are continuing to invest significantly in new carbon-based energy technologies.
This issue of the Health and Human Rights Journal explores a range of threats to human health from climate change, and examines these dangers as issues of human rights. Imme-diate morbidity and mortality impacts from extreme weather events and sea level rise are known and visible; less obvious and more insidious are health threats arising from the on-going displacement, disenfranchisement, and deprivation brought about by the effects of climate change.
The people who will suffer most are those who were most vulnerable to begin with, living in regions of the world with perilous human security, pervasive poverty, little fulfillment of human rights, geo¬graphic disadvantage, and contributing the least to¬wards greenhouse gas emissions. It is in these places that the threat-multiplying effects of climate change will denigrate human dignity, health, and potential the most. It is in these same disadvantaged settings that fragile health systems are least able to cope with the increased demands they will face.
Responsibility, governance, and accountabil¬ity for climate change remain elusive. There is a chasm between apparent comprehension of the se¬riousness of climate threats and appetite for policy change and effective personal action. Ambitious long-term energy policies are absent and the com¬plex science of climate change is subject to political lobbying, corporate greed, and rampant skepticism. This leads to an unnecessary and deliberate sense of confusion that undermines an imperative for intervention. Without a clear mandate for action, policymakers ignore the long-term threat for short-term gains. It’s still easier to win elections in 2014 by supporting fracking than by promoting a cap-and-trade program to control greenhouse gas emissions. Human health is the price we are already paying.
But the case for climate change is becoming easi¬er to make, as Mary Robinson (former President of Ireland and former United Nations High Commis¬sioner for Human Rights) states in her foreword to our special issue on Climate Justice and the Right to Health. In early 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its Fifth Assess¬ment Report (AR5). The report uses best available evidence to describe the diverse and multi-faceted health threats related to climate change. The prev¬alence of heat-related illness, food insecurity, and waterborne and vectorborne infectious disease is predicted to increase this century, especially among vulnerable populations living in developing coun¬tries. AR5 also links climate change with worsening human security through population displacement, violent conflict, and poverty entrenchment.
The human rights based approach to climate justice
In its resolution on human rights and climate change (2009), the Human Rights Council noted that climate change-related impacts have a range of implications, both direct and indirect, for the effec¬tive enjoyment of human rights, including the right to life, the right to adequate food, the right to the highest attainable standard of health, the right to adequate housing, the right to self determination, and human rights obligations related to access to safe drinking water and sanitation. The resolution also recognized that the effects of climate change will be felt most acutely by those segments of the population who are already vulnerable and mar¬ginalized due to factors such as geography, pover¬ty, gender, age, indigenous or minority status, and disability.
Adopting a rights-based approach to climate change action begins by recognizing the obligations of states to respect, protect, and fulfill all human rights threatened by climate change. It then requires states to begin a transparent and participatory pro¬cess with their own people, and international part¬ners, to determine a plan of mitigation and adapta¬tion, addressing the rights of the most vulnerable first.
In order to avoid “The Great Procrastination” as the rightful definition of this generation, it is imper¬ative that states affirm their commitment to human rights by:
:: acknowledging the irrefutable science link¬ing climate change to human health; and
::: proactively instituting climate change mit¬igation in a participatory, transparent, and accountable manner.
Climate justice seeks redress for those whose hu¬man rights are threatened by climate change. It requires international institutional action, organi¬zation, and global governance that promote equity, and avoid historic patterns of further disadvan¬taging the developing world. By invoking person¬al action, we have the opportunity to keep the cli¬mate change conversation relevant to individuals worldwide. Until most people, especially those in positions of influence, understand that immediate action is needed to prevent even more negative out¬comes and suffering associated with climate change, our procrastination will continue and pressure on political leaders will remain too little.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was created in response to global outrage at the human suffering and atrocities of the Second World War. The world united to ensure that humankind would never again experience such loss of dignity and freedom. Unabated climate change poses exactly this threat; it is imperative that we use our human rights entitlements to guide the process and actions to mitigate such disaster.
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