CLIMATE CHANGE AND HUMAN RIGHTS Foreword Ten years ago, the Inuit people asked the Inter-American Human Rights Commission to hear their claim that the unchecked effects of climate change were violating their human rights. At the time, the request seemed quixotic, especially after the Commission declined to hear the case. In retrospect, however, the Inuit petition was the first harbinger of a sea-change in how the international community thinks about climate change. In 2007, a group of small island states came together to adopt the Male’ Declaration, the first intergovernmental statement that “climate change has clear and immediate implications for the full enjoyment of human rights.” The next year, they convinced the United Nations Human Rights Council to adopt the first of what became a series of resolutions linking climate change to a host of impacts on human rights. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights then issued a seminal report describing those effects. And in 2010, the State Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change agreed in Cancun that the “Parties should, in all climate change related actions, fully respect human rights.” The relevance of human rights to climate change is now universally recognized. On Human Rights Day last year, December 10, 2014, all 78 UN human rights mandate-holders came together to issue a joint statement underscoring the threat climate change poses to human rights, and unanimously calling on States “to make sure that human rights are at the core of climate change governance.” At the same time, the human rights norms relating to the enjoyment of a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment have been clarified. As the first UN Independent Expert (and as of March 2015, the first Special Rapporteur) on human rights and the environment, I have had the honor of hearing from practitioners and scholars all over the world how human rights are being applied to environmental problems generally and to climate change in particular. The question is no longer whether human rights law has anything to say about climate change, but rather what it says and how it can best be brought to bear. This report is the most detailed and comprehensive study yet undertaken of those questions. It arrives at a critical moment, as the Parties to the UNFCCC meet in Paris to begin a new chapter in our generational effort to defeat climate change. The report provides an indispensable basis for climate policy going forward, helping us see in detail how climate change threatens our ability to enjoy our human rights, and also how the exercise of human rights can inform and guide our climate policies. As the report makes clear, a human rights perspective on climate change not only provides a stark warning of what is at stake - it also gives us a beacon of hope that we can solve this problem together. John H. Knox, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment v ii