Climate justice and human rights

Abstract

Climate change as well as climate policies can have adverse effects on the human rights of certain population groups – and can exacerbate situations of injustice. As it stands today, the human rights regime is not set to sufficiently address these situations of climate injustice. In this article, I suggest a systematization of the normative climate justice literature that can be used as an analytical framework to evaluate current developments in human rights law and policy, and their potential to diminish inter-national, intra-societal and inter-generational climate injustice. I argue that further advancing procedural and substantive human rights obligations and corresponding enforcement mechanisms constitute one important way of establishing climate justice practices. Moreover, I suggest that the normative climate justice literature can be fruitfully used in International Relations to evaluate policy developments at the intersection between climate change and other policy fields.