The right to an evergreen future : examining a universal right to a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment at the intersection of human rights and climate change

Abstract

Climate change is an existential and escalating threat to human life. In 2018, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, John Knox, made a call for the United Nations to formally recognize a human right to a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. This right, he argued, would help address some of the gaps in human rights architecture when it comes to the environment and climate change. This paper seeks to identify what those gaps are, and how a human right to a healthy environment could prove beneficial. In order to do so, it examines the extent to which established human rights in UN human rights treaties have been ‘greened’, or reinterpreted in the context of climate change to impose specific obligations on States to combat climate change and protect the environment. Then, this paper explores the UN Climate Change Regime to determine to what extent human rights are protected within the highest existing system of international climate governance. These examinations illustrate that, despite the overlapping and mutually reinforcing nature of International Human Rights Law and International Environmental Law, significant gaps in protection for the intersection of human rights in the context of climate change exist. This paper will finally examine the Special Rapporteur’s proposal for the right to a healthy environment, as well as institutions that have already recognized this right at national and regional levels, to evaluate the benefits of such a right. This paper ultimately concludes that a universal right to a healthy environment would significantly improve the unification of environmental and human rights efforts to combat climate change and protect individuals.