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.

Strong legal frameworks to curb climate change, which can effectively protect human health against negative climate-related impacts, must be informed by robust health evidence of the public health sector. Close interdisciplinary cooperation between public health and legal experts is necessary to build robust legal frameworks and support litigation, including for the protection of countries or persons with heightened vulnerability to climate change, i.e. in the Global South, or for children, women, displaced persons, indigenous peoples, small farmers or those with pre-existing health conditions.

What rights and obligations for the protection of health already exist in the face of climate change, for various different State and non-State actors, and for different vulnerable groups? Also, what are identifiable challenges, short comings and opportunities for greater legal protection?

How can climate and health law and policies be strengthened through better cooperation between the legal and public health professions? How can climate litigation be strengthened by improving health-related arguments with robust and diverse evidence of negative health impacts at country, regional, local or personal level?

From Analysis to Action. Climate Change Litigation: A Guide for Public Health Practioners (November 2023) endorsed by the Global Network for Academic Public Health (GNAPH), the European Public Health Association (EUPHA), Lancet Countdown, the Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region (ASPHER), the Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education (GCCHE) and the World Federation of Public Health Associations (WFPHA).

Researchers

Current research assistants

• Monique van Cauwenberghe (Health Arguments in Climate Litigation related to Displacement)
• Daphné Bruggemann (Right to Mental Health and Climate Change).

Further inquiries for research projects in this area are welcomed.

Research outputs