Human Rights and Climate Change – Broadening the Right to Environment

This chapter investigates the interaction between individuals and states in the face of climate change. It looks into the points of intersection between climate change and human rights regimes by examining the extent to which the climate change regime has recognized and addressed the human rights dimensions of climate change. Indeed, climate change is but one of many global environmental issues and where the climate change regime is part of the corpus of international environmental law, it looks into the extent to which the debate on a right to environment can be used in the context of climate change. International environmental law includes instruments that embrace the human dimensions of environmental issues as reflected, for instance, in the definition of sustainable development adopted in the Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development at the Johannesburg World Conference on Environment and Development