Climate pathways and the future of human rights

The science of climate change approaches the future through ‘scenarios’ and ‘pathways’, elaborated in successive IPCC reports that, beginning from putative endpoints in terms of likely temperature increases by 2100, plot backwards to trace likely trajectories (social, political, economic) leading to possible future outcomes. The body of law comprising ‘human rights’ is implicated in this future-casting—both insofar as the future endpoints themselves denote a series of relative outcomes (successes and failures) in the ‘implementation’ of human rights norms and objectives and insofar as human rights law supplies a series of directives that stand, in principle, to shape future climate trajectories. Despite this apparent co-constitution, however, these twin registers—climate change and human rights—remain strikingly detached from one another from both normative and epistemological perspectives. In thinking about climate change and human rights together, a science of probability-assessment and scenario-construction confronts a law of principled purity and factual certitude. The chapter examines possible ‘human rights pathways’ by reference to the determination of global temperature targets, on one hand, and of national mitigation policies, on the other.