Climate change and human rights: a rough guide

This report discusses a spectrum of human rights concerns raised by anthropogenic climate change and by the strategies devised to address it. It does not seek to reframe climate change as a “human rights issue” or to buttress the many existing grounds for urgent cuts in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions with human rights rationale. Rather, it pinpoints areas where climate change will have direct and indirect human rights impacts, and where human rights principles might sharpen policy-making on climate change, including in the two core policy areas of adaptation (preparing for the unavoidable and foreseeable effects of climate change) and mitigation (reducing GHG emissions in order to curb climate change).