Climate Change

Climate change is a public health emergency. Continuing global warming is the single biggest threat to global health, peace, and security, a crisis multiplier, and a significant driver of health inequalities. It also raises profound issues of human rights and dignity.

Climate change negatively affects opportunities for health both directly - e.g. through increased exposure to heat, cold, floods, droughts and wildfires, or altered disease patterns - and indirectly - by suddenly or slowly disrupting people's access to essential underlying determinants of health, such as food and nutrition, housing, access to safe and potable water and adequate sanitation, safe and healthy working conditions, and a healthy living environment (e.g. large scale disasters, desertification). Adequate protection of human health requires effective and timely responses in terms of mitigation and adaptation, including as a matter of strong national and international legal protection and responses. Since the IPCC warns about the physical limits to and dangers of focusing excessively on future adaptation strategies, mitigation seems a prime concern in meeting health concerns.

There is increasing evidence that the impacts of climate change not only affect the physical health of individuals and communities, but their mental health as well. Mental health is not only at stake due to the devasting impacts of climate disasters, but also in the sense of experiences of eco-anxiety and solastalgia: the overwhelming sense of loss of the environment, exacerbated by feelings of lack of control over this process, and our (in)ability to cope with this. Climate litigation by youth groups increasingly gives expression to these mental health effects; but how can such factors be better captured in legal terms, and in terms of human rights?

Within GCHL, a growing climate and health research team explores and evaluates the legal dimensions of health and climate change, and the various legal regimes that are available to ensure human and planetary health in the face of global climate change. This includes international and regional human rights frameworks, including especially the right to physical and mental health, the right to a healthy environment, or the right to a stable climate, but also other relevant (hard and soft) legal instruments of prime importance in this field, such as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 2015 Paris Agreement, the UN Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Current key topics include

• Physical and mental health arguments in climate litigation
• Mental health and climate change
• Climate displacement
• Youth and other vulnerable groups
• The right to a healthy environment
• Human rights and international climate law