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Climate Wrongs and Human Rights: Putting People at the Heart of Climate-Change Policy

Author: Kate Raworth
Date: 2008
Size: 34 pages (291KB)

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Summary

What do human rights principles imply for states’ responsibilities in tackling climate change? What rights-based policy approaches and actions are needed? This paper from Oxfam argues that rich countries are violating the human rights of millions of the world’s poorest people by failing to tackle climate change. Excessive greenhouse-gas emissions cause climatic events which are set to undermine people’s rights to life, security, food, water, health, shelter, and culture on a massive scale. Human rights principles must be put at the heart of climate change policy-making and international legal mechanisms must adapt to global interconnectness in order to stop irreversible damage to humanity’s future.

Climate policy decisions should be based on human rights principles rather than economics, because the financial costs of cutting emissions for rich countries cannot be compared with the severe human costs of climate change for the poor. Human rights principles give states responsibility for reducing emissions, building resilience to unavoidable climate change impacts, and for taking national and international action to protect people’s rights in the face of climate change. Human rights laws and institutions need to adapt quickly to the global interconnectness of climate change to help prevent rights worldwide from being further undermined.

The following human rights principles should inform policymaking:

• Guaranteeing a core minimum: States must ensure that everyone enjoys at the very least a basic standard of their rights.
• Focusing on vulnerability: States must focus first on those who are disadvantaged and whose rights are most at risk, in order to eliminate discrimination.
• Ensuring participation: States must enable people to participate in designing and implementing policies that will affect their rights.
• Providing accountability: States must establish mechanisms to monitor and report publicly on the status of rights, and to respond to violations by providing remedies for those affected.
• Delivering on international co-operation: All states – especially those with the economic means – must help realise human rights worldwide through international assistance and co-operation.

States should take the following urgent actions:

• Rich countries must lead now in cutting global emissions to keep global warming well below two degrees. They must also provide the finance needed for international adaptation and for low-carbon technologies in developing countries.
• Rich countries must halt their biofuel policies and developing-country governments must protect the rights of poor people through domestic regulation of biofuel production.
• Developing countries must focus their adaptation strategies on the most vulnerable people by putting poor communities at the heart of planning, addressing women’s needs and providing social protection schemes.
• Developing countries must have ownership in managing international adaptation funds and in turn, must be accountable to vulnerable communities for how the finance is spent.

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Source: Kate Raworth, 2008, 'Climate Wrongs and Human Rights: Putting People at the Heart of Climate-Change Policy', Oxfam Briefing Paper 117, Oxfam International, Oxford
Author: Oxfam, http://www.oxfam.org.uk