Human Rights and Climate Change

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.

ISBN 0521762766   DEWEY edition DC22 ISBN13 9780521762762 (What's this?)   Pages 368 Publisher Cambridge University Press   Weight (grammes) 700 Imprint Cambridge University Press   Published in Cambridge Format Hardback   Height (mm) 228 Publication date 03 Dec 2009   Width (mm) 152 Writer of foreword Mary Robinson   Spine width (mm) 20 DEWEY 341.48   Academic level Postgraduate

		Authors' biographies
		Foreword by Mary Robinson
Introduction		Human rights and climate change by Stephen Humphreys		1
Pt. I		Rights perspectives on global warming		35
1		Competing claims: human rights and climate harms by Stephen Humphreys		37
2		Climate change, human rights and moral thresholds by Simon Caney		69
3		Equitable utilization of the atmosphere: a rights-based approach to climate change? by Dinah Shelton		91
4		Climate change, human rights and corporate accountability by Peter Newell		126
5		Rethinking human rights: the impact of climate change on the dominant discourse by Sam Adelman		159
Pt. II		Priorities, risks and inequities in global responses		181
6		The Kyoto Protocol and vulnerability: human rights and equity dimensions by Philippe Cullet		183
7		Forests, climate change and human rights: managing risks and trade-offs by Frances Seymour		207
8		Climate change and the right to the highest attainable standard of health by Paul Hunt and Rajat Khosla		238
9		Human rights and vulnerability to climate change by Jon Barnett		257
10		Climate change, evolution of disasters and inequality by John C. Mutter and Kye Mesa Barnard		272
		Conclusion		297
11		Conceiving justice: articulating common causes in distinct regimes by Stephen Humphreys		299
Appendix		Climate change impacts on human rights		320
		Index		332

'What this collection does for the first time, however, is think through the human rights implications of climate change and ask how the substantial body of international human rights law and experience relates to that phenomenon. ... As the present collection progressively clarifies, if we build human rights criteria into our future planning, we will better understand who is at risk and how we should act to protect them.' Mary Robinson, President of Realising Rights: The Ethical Globalisation Initiative 'Human Rights and Climate Change does an excellent job of analysing the many links between climate change and human rights. As the consequences of climate change will manifest themselves over time, human-rights lawyers, courts, and tribunals are likely to find themselves confronted with climate-change-related questions, and [this book] is a good place to start reading about them.' Ole W. Pedersen, University of Newcastle

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