Human Rights as a Source of Climate Harm
Rethinking Justice in the Anthropocene
Holly Perrins
This thesis contends that human rights in their current individualistic and myopic nature
reproduce the structural harms underlying climate injustice. Through privileging the
protection of autonomous interests, human rights frameworks conceal the significance of
ecological interdependency, whereby humans rely on their environmental surroundings to
flourish. This individualistic approach also renders collective climate harms as difficult to
address. Human rights frameworks are predominantly designed to accommodate
individualised harms, consequently overlooking the collective nature of climate harm.
Additionally, the claims of future generations are marginalised due to the shortsightedness of
human rights foundations. The prioritisation of present living interests obscures the impacts
of current environmental degradation on the future population’s quality of life, limiting their
ability to enjoy the necessary environmental conditions for human growth.
This paper evaluates whether the current notion of human rights is adequately equipped to
confront climate injustice without replicating the very harms it seeks to overcome.
Nevertheless, renouncing human rights entirely would be unwarranted, given their potential
to provide a universal foundation for pursuing social justice. Instead, this author argues that a
transformative reinterpretation of rights through an eco-centric approach could be part of a
just response. Identifying the environment as subject to its own rights can simultaneously
advance climate justice for humanity by protecting the ecosystems that we rely on to survive.
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