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CONNECTING CLIMATE JUSTICE, HUMAN RIGHTS AND BURDEN-SHARING: A PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE LAURA GARCÍA-PORTELA Laura García-Portela is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Philosophy and Doctoral Program in Climate Change at the University of Graz, Austria. Her research interests cover moral and political philosophy, with a focus on climate justice issues. She is currently writing her dissertation on a normative foundation for climate policies of Loss and Damage. Her work has appeared in collective works on green democracy, intergenerational justice and global studies, as well as in international and interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journals, such as Ethics, Policy and the Environment, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics and Teorema.
Global heating is leading to increased temperatures, rising sealevels, and more frequent extreme weather events. These planetary changes threaten the livelihood of people across the world and raise many human rights and climate justice concerns. This article connects human rights with climate justice from the perspective of philosophy. Firstly, I define dangerous climate change invoking the notion of human rights. Secondly, I argue that climate justice concerns the protection against human rights impacts caused by climate change through mitigation and adaptation measures, as well as the compensation for the impact. Thirdly, I argue that climate justice also requires a fair burden-sharing scheme and propose three alternative principles of justice.
DEFINING DANGEROUS CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE FOUNDATIONAL ROLE OF HUMAN RIGHTS There is agreement within the scientific community that the aim of climate policies should be to avoid dangerous climate change. But what counts as dangerous climate change? The answer to this cannot be found in science. Instead we need to turn to ethics to consider what kinds of values we hold, what we want to protect and the weight we attach to competing interests. The notion of dangerous climate change is inherently linked to the concept of human rights. That is, climate change becomes dangerous once it threatens or infringes people’s ability to enjoy their human rights.1 Therefore, if our aim is to avoid dangerous climate change we need to keep human rights to the fore. What are human rights, and what do they mean in the context of climate change? Human rights are moral thresholds.2 They are fundamental interests to ensure a minimally good life, or, in other words, a life with dignity. Human rights can therefore be needs3,
