As human health relies on healthy ecosystems, climate change poses dire health and human rights risks
Climate change has not traditionally been seen as a health and human rights concern—but that may be changing following recent high-profile court cases.
On April 9 the European Court of Human Rights ruled in favour of a group of elderly Swiss women who claimed the government’s inadequate efforts to combat climate change put them at risk of dying during heatwaves. And in India, the Supreme Court on April 6 recognised the right against the adverse effects of climate change as a distinct fundamental right in the Constitution. In that judgement, one of the judges said the rights to life and equality couldn’t be fully realised without a clean, stable environment. The court also highlighted the connection between climate change and the right to health.
Also read: How Asia’s leading sustainability think tanks are pushing eco-friendly progress
How climate change threatens human rights
The World Health Organization has declared climate change to be the greatest threat to health that humanity faces. Since climate change affects so many aspects of our lives, its effects on health and health care are complex, multiple and highly variable across geographies, ecozones and development levels.
There are direct impacts on our bodies and communities, such as have emerged with extreme heat, droughts, floods, fires and other climate change-driven catastrophic events. There also are more complex and indirect impacts, such as increasing food insecurity, the rising threat of infectious diseases, increased exposure to water and air pollutants, the health impacts of forced mobility and migration, and the mental health and social impacts of the climate crisis that affect us on our deepest levels.
Yet climate change has not traditionally been seen as a health and human rights concern—a reality which arguably needs to change. In a report published last month in The Lancet, “Under threat: The International AIDS Society-Lancet Commission on Health and Human Rights,” we suggested several pathways through which climate change bears on the right to health.
Don't miss: Southeast Asia's healthcare workforce needs to be ready for climate change
The path to climate justice
A foundational principle of human rights is universality. We do not derive rights from citizenship or social standing, but from the fundamental basis of our shared humanity. Indeed, the founding document of the modern human rights movement is called “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, precisely because the rights it enshrines are held to be universal—shared by us all.
A terrible irony of the climate crisis, however, is that the burdens of climate change are not shared equally by all. Those who have done the least to impact the climate—the peoples of low- and middle-income countries, the rural poor and Indigenous communities—are by far the most affected. This raises the issue of climate justice: what do the highly industrialised nations, which have so damaged the climate, owe to those whose health, livelihoods and very survival are being impacted by the crisis?
Many of the worst-affected states, including the small island nations, have argued that reparations are essential if they are to survive. Indigenous peoples, particularly those still living on their traditional lands, are literally fighting for their lives against loggers, miners, ranchers, farming interests, the energy industries and others who seek the bounty they have preserved for us all.
Without protection for Indigenous rights, we may lose the world’s last great forests. Earth has essentially three lungs: the Amazon Basin, the Congo Basin, and what remains of the forests of Southeast Asia. Without these great generators of oxygen and capturers of carbon, Earth’s atmosphere would soon cease to be breathable for mammals, including humans. This makes Indigenous rights inextricably linked to all of our health and well-being.