To grasp the immense human rights implications of climate change, read the series of reports produced by the Potsdam Institute, Turn Down the Heat. Starting from the observation that, unless something extraordinary happens very soon, global average temperatures are likely to rise 4°C above preindustrial levels before 2100—well above the international target of 2°C—the reports document the ensuing carnage.
These reports, like most climate change studies, do not refer to ‘human rights’ by name. But the story they tell is one of phenomenal hardship. Extreme heat waves (think Russia 2010) would become “the new normal summer”. In the tropics, the heat will be beyond “the historical range of temperature and extremes to which human and natural ecosystems have adapted and coped”. Indeed at a 4°C increase, say the authors, life in the tropics will cease to be liveable.
Rearticulated in human rights terms, the reports detail risks to: the right to food (productivity plummeting, export incomes hit, sudden price shocks); to health (vastly increased mortality, malnutrition, diarrheal diseases, and raging vector diseases—dengue, Chikungunya and malaria); to water (in the Middle East “the increase in demand for irrigation water will be difficult to meet due to the simultaneous decrease in water availability”); to work (“heat stress levels can approach the physiological limits of people working outdoors and severely undermine regional labor productivity”); to housing (“informal settlements on flood plains and steep hillsides … have been severely affected by floods and landslides in recent years”); to life. The poor are most vulnerable, and their numbers will grow: “shocks and stresses related to climate change can undermine poverty reduction and push new groups into poverty.”
