Climate change justice and human rights: An African perspective

Abstract

The present and future projection on climate change trends and related impacts raise considerable concerns for vulnerable populations in Africa. Reports show that growing temperatures and sea levels, fluctuating precipitation patterns and more extreme weather are threatening human health and safety, food and water security and socio-economic development in Africa. These developments have implications for the human rights of populations across the world. Yet, in an unequal world, different populations will be able to adapt differently. Also, climate interventions are problematic as Africa states tend to resist their climate commitments as human rights duty bearers. This reluctance is informed by their view that states in the Global North largely bear historical responsibility for the current state of the climate, and the reality that African states are required to engage in climate change-induced sacrifices in order to ensure acutely needed economic development. While the need for climate justice is unquestionable, African states understandably ask how useful it is to frame legal responses through a human rights and, thus, an accountability lense. In the two decades since the interface of climate change and human rights was first made explicit by the UN Human Rights Council with the adoption of Resolution 10/4 of 2009, human rights has featured consistently as a framework for articulating the causes of climate change as human wrongs and in clarifying states’ obligations to address these adverse effects. Most recently, the UN Human Rights Council Resolution 47/24 of 2021 reaffirms that adverse effects of climate change have a range of direct and indirect implications on the effective enjoyment of human rights, including on the right to life, the right to adequate food, the right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, the right to adequate housing, the right to self-determination, the rights to safe drinking water and sanitation, the right to work and the right to development. At the regional level, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights has in a number of resolutions also gradually given greater prominence to climate change. The challenge of the moment is to ensure that human rights are on the front burner in the formulation and application of legal frameworks to address and redress the causes, consequences and layers of accountability related to climate change.