Individual Rights and Climate Change - Essay Example

According to the research findings climate change will have major impact on people all over the world. Majority of the world’s population is susceptible to threats such as interruptions to water supply; raise in the severity of hurricanes, floods and famines, coastal erosion as a result of sea level increase; and to harmful human health effects, for instance, by means of an increase in the range as well as spread of disease. The effects of climate change are also a specific concern within the Asia Pacific region.

In accordance with the fifth report from the “Working Group on Climate Change and Development, Up in Smoke? Asia and the Pacific released in November 2007”, the human drama of climate change will mostly be carried out within Asia, where more than 52 percent of the world’s entire population - more or less 5 billion people - lives. While responding to climate change, governments have conventionally tackled it as an environmental issue or more recently, as a fiscal one. Up until now, the communal as well as human rights inferences of climate change have little awareness.

Yet the human costs of climate change openly intimidate basic human civil rights; “rights to life, to food, to a place to live and work, rights that governments have an obligation to protect”. One UN official states that global warming as well as severe weather conditions may have disastrous effects on the human rights of millions of individuals. Eventually, climate change may have an effect on the very right to life of a number of individuals; nations have a responsibility to prevent and deal with some of the “direst consequences that climate change may reap on human rights” (Godrej, 2006, p. 39). Equity concerns as well take place within the climate change perspective due to its inconsistent effect on already susceptible individuals as well as communities (Alston et al, 2007, p. 66). As said by the UK Secretary of State for the Environment, communally, climate change creates intense queries of impartiality and justice “between generations, between the developing and developed worlds; between rich and poor within each country” (McAdam, 2010, p. 62). The test is to discover a reasonable allocation of tasks as well as human rights.

States have a positive responsibility to safeguard individuals against the danger created for civil rights by climate change, irrespective of the causes. The most successful way of easing this is to implement a civil rights based approach to strategy as well as governmental reactions to climate change; an advancement that is normatively supported by global civil rights values and that is aimed at encouraging as well as defending human rights (O’Brien et al, 2010, p. 43). Second part of this paper focuses on the human rights aspects of climate change.

Particularly, it tries to find out how the human rights enclosed within the major global mechanisms are in jeopardy by the effects of climate change. Third part then goes on to focus on what responsibilities are imposed on countries, in both global as well as domestic regulation to act in response to these threats. Fourth part focuses on how nations may accomplish their human rights responsibilities, in the perspective of climate change reactions; arguing that a civil