Addressing Climate Change through Sustainable Development and Promotion of Human Rights

Public Policy, Social Science, Environmental Policy, Climate Change, Human Rights, Sustainable Development

Climate change certainly poses a risk to the human rights of millions of people. The threat includes their rights to life, food, water and health etc. The risks are comparatively more in developing countries including India other South Asian countries, where extreme weather events, crop failures and other emergencies related to climate change are projected to occur with greater frequency. It is a fact that most of the developing countries lacks the necessary technological and financial resources to adapt to climate change. Financial, economic and food crises along with growing populations creates difficulties in realising the economic, social and cultural rights of their people. It is a matter of fact that capacity of developing countries to realise human rights domestically is further limited as a result of the over-use by developed countries of the global atmospheric space and the global carbon budget. This paper while basing its analysis on both primary and secondary literature would attempt to bring out and understand the trends of international human rights obligations in light of the multiple constraints climate change poses to the sustainable development of developing countries. Climate change will impact a wide range of these human rights and could potentially lead to their serious and widespread violation. Preventing climate change-induced human rights violations requires intensive international cooperation. In particular, it requires that inequities between developed and developing countries and their citizens are addressed in accordance with the legal principle of affirmative action. This paper demonstrates that the framework provided by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is particularly suitable to facilitate rights-based cooperation in accordance with the principle of affirmative action and the legal duty of all states to cooperate to realise human rights. The UNFCCC framework, including the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol, is premised on legal principles that run parallel to, and reinforce, international human rights obligations.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.