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Human Rights and Climate Change

Introduction

Climate change is a main concern for its impact on people, beyond small interests in natural science. For instance, the tundra may be thawing in the Polar Regions, which can be of scientific interest in its own right. However, the most serious question is what difference it makes for economies, societies, governance, and human well-being. This question is growing in salience as the knowledge base about climate change improves. About whether climate change is happening, there is now a very broad consensus that global warming is a reality. About why it is happening, the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports persuasive evidence that human activities are a significant cause. The remaining issue is that policies do not entail it. Humanity has been adaptable throughout its history to innumerable challenges. Is the change in climate something that will present significant challenges, or is it just one of many driving forces of social and economic change over the next century and beyond?

Current Knowledge about Social and Economic Impacts

Some impacts of climate change are already obvious, mainly in the polar areas, where traditional societies are finding it difficult to sustain their ways of life and modern societies are facing the impacts of thawing tundra on physical infrastructures. However, in most cases, the recent major climate events in the United States, such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Ike in 2008, along with a summer heat wave in 2006 and regional water shortages in the winter of 2007-2008, are not attributable to climate change because, climate has historically been so variable. These events can be considered examples of the impacts that could become more frequent with climate change, which is very instructive; but they cannot be interpreted with a high degree of confidence as impacts of climate change itself.

The most critical issues lie ahead. What might climate change mean for economies and societies in the long run? Climate change is expected to mean increases in average temperatures, more severe toward the poles; changes in both the total amount and the intensity of regional precipitation; changes in the intensities and locations of severe weather events; and sea-level rise. Clearly, such changes could be important in several locations, but projecting the impacts on human-systems in the long term is complicated since other things will also be changing over that period, such as demographic patterns, global economic relationships, available technologies, and institutional structures and practices. The socioeconomic effects of climate change will depend on how climate change interacts with these other kinds of change. Consider, for example, how much climate change might increase by 2080 the vulnerabilities of people living in coastal areas subject to sea-level rise and seasonal storms. By that time, populations in vulnerable areas will have had three generations of experience with storms and coping strategies, from risks of storm disruptions and damages to increased costs and reduced coverage of losses from private insurance. Voluntary retreats from vulnerable coastal areas may have ...