Climate change and human rights: this volume systemically sheds light on an
increasingly vital subject, tackling critical issues, such as the centrality of the basic
claim to (a sustainable) environment for resolving problems of causation and
imputation. Whereas these questions have been mostly approached politically, the
book interestingly discloses above all both a theoretical and practical legal per -
spective. The contributors thus comprehensively explore the reciprocal regulatory
implications of human rights and global warming, whose scope and consequences
have so far been largely underestimated.
From a realistic and cosmopolitan standpoint, actual damages and future
threats posed by climate change to fundamental rights bolster the idea of ‘risk
society’, first posited by Ulrich Beck.1 Global warming has a universal impact, so
much so that it affects Australia and Goudier Island, Alaska, Paris, Beijing, Rio
de Janeiro or New Delhi alike: its effects concern human beings as such, not as
nationals of different countries. Everyone is concerned: together with the right to
environment, which is progressively developing in domestic and supranational case
law and regulation, the claim of humanity to survival is eventually at stake.
Individual and collective perspectives therefore merge with one another:
threatened by climate change, intertwined particular and collective rights may
allow overcoming national and cultural barriers. Along these lines, as postulated
by Jürgen Habermas,2 globalised human relationships at best facilitate the
conception of a universal community and ‘global citizenship’.3 Based on the
Kantian idea of a cosmopolitan society centred on individuals and peoples,4
international and domestic law, or even ‘global’ law, can thus play a key role in
shaping the relationship between climate change and human rights. Within this
context, the book develops a robust practical analysis of current and prospective
positive regulation, outlining its potential, loopholes and limits, against a consistent
theoretical background, sharply inspired by tripartite fundamental obligations.