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Aparna Rajeev

Climate change: from a humanitarian perspective



Anthropogenic climate change is undoubtedly one of the greatest threats that humanity has ever experienced. Referred to as a “crisis multiplier” by the United Nations, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their report released in August 2021 has suggested that climate change has the capacity to detrimentally impact human lives and fragile ecosystems, thus endangering the often taken-for-granted access to clean water, food, air and other natural resources essential for sustenance of life on this planet (Relief Web 2021).


While the adverse impacts of climate change have long been recognized, it is an unfortunate reality that discourses surrounding climate change have predominantly been constructed within the singular framework of economic development. Torn off its inherent humanness, conversations on climate change often obscure the tales of millions of human beings whose lives have been and continue to be disproportionately affected by the climate crisis. This blog post argues that it thus becomes essential for policymakers and analysts to push for a holistic climate action plan which is only possible through the examination of climate change from the lens of a human rights or humanitarian perspective.


Humanization, impacts and intersectionality of climate change and human rights


“There’s one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other, and that is the urgent threat of a changing climate”- Barack Obama


Since the inception in the 1980s of research conducted on greenhouse gas emissions and the consequent global warming, the results of numerous studies have unanimously established climate change as a man-made catastrophe. This is reflected in several recent events across the world, from the calamitous tropical storms across the Caribbean and the Pacific in 2019 and droughts and heatwaves in Sub-Saharan Africa, to the recent record-scale floods in Germany and China. Causing widespread devastation and death, these landmark events only stand testimony to the urgency with which climate change needs to be addressed and above all, how climate change is intertwined with human rights.


The seminal IPCC report of 2019 that grabbed international attention stated that global warming has already reached the level of 1 degree Celsius and will prove even more catastrophic if global warming in the coming years reaches 1.5 degrees Celsius or surpasses the designated level (IPCC 2019). This level of warming would result in severe aftereffects in the form of melting glaciers, rising sea levels and desertification, leading to the endangerment of fundamental human rights such as right to life, livelihood, health, and education.


Over time, climate change has been recognised to be intersectional with other challenges such as human rights violations. This realisation can be traced back to 2005 when the Inuit community raised concerns that rising sea levels from melting glaciers could lead to a violation of their human rights, notably the right to life (UNEP 2015). Considered a significant turning point in how the world increasingly perceived climate change, the concerns voiced by the Inuit people were echoed by another landmark event in 2006 which marked the release of the seminal research paper, The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. Published by the Government of the United Kingdom, the review was among the first studies to recognize how climate change can endanger several fundamental human rights.


Impacting more than just fragile natural ecosystems and rich biodiversity of vulnerable regions, an analysis of several natural disasters rooted in climate change echoes how this phenomenon leads to the dispossession of basic rights such as the right to clean water and air. This is exemplified through the cases of island nations such as Madagascar. The country is currently experiencing a man-made drought whose implications can be seen through the high rates of malnutrition- and starvation-caused deaths as well as the large number of conflicts as a result of intense food scarcity (CNN 2021). This is also the case with several island nations especially in Asia and the Pacific such as the Maldives, which is predicted to be completely submerged by the year 2100. Labelled as the ‘paradise paradox’, a close analysis of the environmental changes brought about by the rising sea levels shows that, over the last two decades, 20 islands of the nation have already sunk while over 100 small islands are experiencing soil erosion at an unbelievable rate (Chaudhuri 2019). This demonstrates how the fundamental rights of human beings such as the right to life, food security and self-determination is being compromised through the devastating impacts of climate change.


Representing one of the most well-known debates in the field of climate negotiations in the international arena, the above-mentioned case studies are a reflection of how the North-South divide or the debate between developed versus developing countries still exists. Experiencing some of the most profound impacts of climate change, several of these nations have suffered disproportionately despite the fact that their contribution to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are almost negligible in comparison to several other nations in the Global North. Necessitating the importance of climate justice and equity in these discussions surrounding adaptation and mitigation, this debate thus makes it essential that we as a global community investigate the uneven impacts of climate change and most importantly, the bearers of these incongruent effects.


Who is most affected by climate change?

One of the facets that makes climate change a social phenomenon besides being an environmental catastrophe is the disproportionate impacts on certain groups of people, which often leads to already marginalized communities being further relegated to the peripheries of society. Attaining a complex character and becoming one of the most hard-to-tackle global challenges that the world has ever witnessed, the inequalities exacerbated by climate change thus stand indicative of the inextricable relationship between climate change and human rights.


It is useful to analyze the disproportionately impacted by category, beginning with the much-discussed debate on the divide between the Global North and Global South on environmental impact. Here it becomes necessary to consider that developed countries (including the United States and other countries in the EU) together are responsible for 92% of the carbon emissions in the world. As suggested by The Lancet Planetary Health Report in September 2020, the challenge of climate change becomes insurmountable to tackle mainly because of the lack of accountability on the part of these Global North nations to take ownership of their emissions. However, while accountability certainly is a challenge, climate change is further aggravated by how the disproportionate liability in terms of the brutal ramifications of this phenomenon is borne by the countries of the Global South or developing nations, whose contribution to environmental pollution or climate change is negligible. Exemplified through examples such as heatwaves killing thousands in Pakistan and destructive flooding in the Marshall Islands, this indicates how climate change affects the human rights of the most vulnerable.


Expanding the scope of the issue further, it becomes clear that ethnicity and race also play a pivotal role in the divergent impacts of climate change. According to the recent report published by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the African American community and other Persons of Color (POC) in the country are often the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change as they are more likely to be living in neighborhoods with low air quality and having higher engagement in weather-exposed industries as opposed to the majority White community (EPA 2021). This is also reproduced among the indigenous communities of several nations such as Australia and the Amazon Basin in the South America, where despite being the caretakers of both environmental resources as well as holding unparalleled indigenous knowledge of forest management and conservation processes, the community is often barred from voicing their concerns through democratic processes or even being a constituent of the governing bodies of their nations (Kent 2022). Another severely marginalized group that is susceptible to the disproportionate effects of climate change is women. This can be increasingly attributed to traditional gender roles and nature of work which makes a large number of rural women dependent on the environment and natural resources such as agriculture. Having considerably less access to any kind of financial or technical resources that can enable them to fight the effects of climate change in a much more structured manner makes them highly prone to bearing the disproportionate effects of climate change (Amnesty International 2021).


Why is it essential to analyze climate change from a human rights perspective?

Exploring climate change and its ramifications in-depth, one can see that while climate change is a global phenomenon, its effects are however highly uneven in nature. Juxtaposing this observation against the discourses on climate change and environmental pollution that dominate today, it is a fact that much of these conversations are structured within the frameworks of scientific, political and economic aspects (Herbert Smith Freehills 2021). It was only recently that the inseparable relationship between human rights and climate change has been recognized worldwide, with the United Nations declaring “access to a healthy environment” an inalienable human right on October 8th 2021. The decades-long effort of demonstrating the interconnected nature of climate change and human rights, along with how the satisfaction of this human right can act as a catalyst for impactful changes in the lives of the most vulnerable population of the world has thus gained recognition at the international level. However, as highlighted by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, a record number of environmental human rights activists and researchers continue to be killed and threatened by the powerful in various parts of the world. Therefore, in order to honor the efforts of the several unsung heroes as well as to ensure that more people - especially the youth community of the world - are encouraged to come forward and raise their voices for the planet and its most affected populations who also happen to be the most voiceless members of the community, it becomes essential for policy analysts to view climate change from a humanitarian perspective.


In fact, viewing climate change through a human rights vantage point aids in building momentum to drive the ongoing global movements for effective climate action, thereby establishing the fact that human rights and climate change are deeply intertwined to the extent that one cannot be realized without the fulfillment of the other (Khalfan and Liguori 2020). This becomes especially important considering the fact that climate change as a social and environmental phenomenon has been extremely hard to tackle on account of the fact that it requires cooperation on a global level. This, in turn, is only possible through the effective participation of states as well as the multinational business conglomerates in the fossil fuel industry. However, in order to make the movement centered on a holistic approach which can both pressurize and persuade the states to make efficient legislation, as well as incentivising fossil fuel industries to switch to sustainable and renewable energy resources, it is necessary that the climate change movement is rooted in values of justice, dignity, equality, fraternity and most importantly empathy. Recognizing these ideals as the core values of the climate change movement and reinforcing the fact that human rights and climate action complement each other is the only way through which the international community can work together to mitigate the differences that exist today between the Global North and the Global South. Through the integration of these rights into building an effective climate action framework, people are able to see fellow human beings as “human” instead of discriminating against people on the basis of race, gender, and other social characteristics.


Broadening the scope of climate change movements to include human rights also provides the benefit of a large number of additional tools at disposal for both states as well as the disproportionately impacted groups in the world. This is on the grounds that “international human rights law provides more extensive legally binding obligations than environmental law” (Ismangil et. al., 2020), which in turn can enable the building of effective climate action frameworks and policies at national, regional as well as the international level. Viewing climate change from a humanitarian perspective thus reflects the fundamental necessity to tackle this challenge not as a mere environmental problem; instead, through humanizing the challenge, climate change becomes a global challenge which is of and should be of concern to the billions of people around the world.

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