Human Rights & the Climate Crisis

The working group on human rights and the climate crisis brings together academics studying the multifaceted ways in which climate change affects human rights. Specifically, the working group is open to all seeking to understand how climate change is an underlying cross-cutting issue that affects all our human rights research. In short: how does climate change impact the types of research questions we ask? Without considering the impacts of climate change on all areas of human research, can human rights research be sufficiently ‘future proof’? How to ensure that human rights research is relevant in 2030, 2040 or 2050, in light of the climate crisis? Even more fundamentally: what role do and can human rights - as a largely anthropocentric ‘human-oriented’ construct - play in this 21st era of climate crisis? Is there a need for more radical, green, ecological and eco-centric approaches, for example as represented by the concept of ‘rights of nature’? The working group is explicitly open to different interdisciplinary perspectives on the study of human rights, as well as different methodological approaches and theories, i.e. ranging from positivist studies to critical studies.