Hurricane Harvey was my first taste of the catastrophic effects of climate change. The storm stalled over Houston for four days, dumping a total of 60 inches of rain. A storm of this nature was unprecedented, the constant rainfall in conjunction with poor land management caused serious flooding that damaged hundreds of thousands of homes. When the rain cleared cleanup efforts started and everyone did their best to move forward but the shadow of Harvey still hangs over the city.
Beyond the increasingly dangerous nature of storms, their frequency has increased as well. Just last year there were a record number of storms in the Atlantic. Hurricane Harvey is evidence of the impact of climate change and a mere glimpse of what our future will be if we do not appropriately address Climate Change.
The global average temperature is rising as a result of greenhouse gasses, like carbon, in the atmosphere. If temperatures rise above 2 degrees, the effects would be beyond those catastrophic events we have already witnessed. As we face the realities of Climate Change, we must work harder to prevent temperatures from rising beyond catastrophic levels and consider how we will address the fallout of climate change. Regardless of what level of warming we hit, there will be impacts and we must be prepared to face them.
The primary approach to address climate change has been through international environmental agreements which set goals to reduce carbon emissions. There has been some success in these efforts, but I believe we can go further by addressing climate change through a Human Rights framework. Enumerating our environmental rights in an international convention, via additional protocol to an existing convention, would put the focus on us, the humans that will suffer if climate change goes unchecked.
The international human rights regime is already well established with mechanisms for enforcement in place. There is even a precedent for environmental rights. Under both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights there is a protection for the right to an adequate standard of living. This is not a specific enumeration of environmental rights, but the negative impacts of climate change certainly violate this right. Therefore, we need to add a specific protocol on environmental rights to the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
Having an environmental rights protocol would provide a secondary means of holding States accountable to their Climate Change commitments and might incline more states to actively participate in mitigation efforts. A human rights approach will also help address the tension between developed and developing states when it comes to commitments – ensuring no state is detrimentally affected by climate goals. Finally, a human rights approach will help us prepare for the very real consequences of climate change that we will have to face.
When the catastrophic impacts of climate change start to make areas of the planet inhabitable and climate refugees are displaced from their homes a human rights framework will give them legal standing. Additionally, it is my hope that by emphasizing a rights-based framework to climate change and putting the focus on those people that feel the effects of the warming planet, others will be more compassionate and more inclined to change their behaviors to help mitigate the effects.
You can support a rights-based approach to climate change with just your voice. Be vocal about environmental rights, and write your representatives illustrating your support for a protocol on environmental rights. Additionally, you can support environmental rights by supporting NGOs that work to protect and promote environmental rights.
We need to take climate change and its effects seriously and that means taking a rights-based approach to climate change.