Campaigns | First published: here | October 18, 2024
Climate change is increasingly driving violations of the right to life and the right to health. In fact, climate change has been called “the greatest global health threat facing the world in the 21st century”.
How does climate change undermine the right to health?
Extreme weather events, including heatwaves, flooding, droughts, wildfires and tropical cyclones, which are increasingly made much more likely and more severe by human-induced climate change, pose a serious threat to people’s right to mental and physical health. Not only are people injured and killed in these events, but public health facilities may be damaged or destroyed, and illnesses can spread among people who are displaced.
An increase in extreme heat in all regions has resulted in more people dying and becoming ill, more occurrence of disease, and more people migrating.
The number of deaths from climate change is expected to be significant, and an even larger number of people will develop disabilities and health conditions. The World Economic Forum estimates that, by 2050, climate change will result in 14.5 million deaths worldwide.
How do fossil fuels undermine the right to health?
The burning of fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – is the primary driver of climate change. Moreover, the extraction, processing, transport and burning of fossil fuels is bad for the health of communities that live close to these operations.
Burning fossil fuels is also one the main causes of air pollution – a significant driver of ill-health. Air pollution has been linked to heart disease, strokes, lung cancer, asthma and other chronic diseases. One study estimates that more than 5 million people die each year from air pollution caused by fossil fuel use.
For these reasons, Amnesty has endorsed a proposal for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty which aims to accelerate the transition to renewable energy.
How do we know that climate change is causing extreme weather?
Scientists are becoming faster and more accurate at assessing the extent to which climate change has influenced a particular weather event. Networks of scientists such as World Weather Attributionand Climate Centralcarry out rapid attribution studies to understand the role of climate change in individual floods, droughts, hurricanes, wildfires and other extreme weather events.
For example, in April and May 2024, countries across the Asian continent including Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Myanmar, Thailand, Viet Nam and the Philippines saw temperatures well above 40°C for many days, exacerbating risks to health for people living in refugee camps and conflict zones, including 1.7 million displaced people in Gaza. World Weather Attribution found that these heatwaves were being made more frequent and more extreme by climate change.
Which communities are worst affected?
The impacts of climate change on the right to health are felt everywhere, on every continent. However, communities on the frontline of climate change are among those worst affected.
A wide range of socio-economic factors affect whether people can lead healthy lives. They include people’s access to food, housing and water, access to healthcare, the extent to which they face marginalization because of racism, xenophobia, homophobia and sexism, and whether they live in a healthy environment. This means that the following people are among those at higher risk from climate-related health harms:
- People living in poverty
- Women and girls
- Indigenous Peoples
- People who face racial discrimination
- People experiencing homelessness
- People living in informal settlements
If steps to address climate change do not prioritize those who are made most vulnerable to it, climate change stands to deepen global inequality and put people who are already at risk of poor health in greater danger of becoming unwell.
Isn’t this about climate justice?
Most states across the world have agreed to be bound by international human rights instruments that require them to respect, protect and fulfil human rights, including the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health. Climate change needs to be seen as an issue of injustice, similar to how we think about other human rights violations.
All of Amnesty’s climate justice work highlights the impacts of climate change on human rights and proposes steps to prevent and recover from these harms. This includes campaigning for an end to fossil fuel use, and campaigning for increased climate financing from the countries that are most responsible for climate change, to promote climate justice in the countries least responsible.
What has Amnesty International already said about this?
Amnesty has already published research on climate-related health harms in numerous countries, including:
- Pakistan – where flooding in 2022 killed more than 1,600 people, injured 12,800 more, and severely damaged the health system
- Libya – where Storm Daniel triggered the collapse of two dams, killing at least 4,352 people in 2023
- Austria – where Amnesty advocated for emergency shelters to be kept open year-round to mitigate the effects of heatwaves on people experiencing homelessness.
- Spain – where Amnesty has raised concern about the grave risks that extreme heat and pollution pose to the health of thousands of people in the summer months.
Amnesty’s research has also exposed how governments have failed to protect the procedural rights of communities who live close to fossil fuel operations, including their rights to access to information, public participation, justice, effective remedies and, in the case of Indigenous Peoples, the right to free, prior and informed consent.
Two examples are the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s struggle against the Coastal Gas Link pipeline in Canada, and the Ogoni people harmed by Shell’s operations in Nigeria.
What are other organizations saying?
Amnesty International is not the only global human rights organization to have begun highlighting how climate change undermines health. Human Rights Watch, for example, has published studies into the health harms of climate change on First Nations people in Canada, people with disabilities and older people in British Columbia, low-income Black and brown pregnant people in the USA, and people with disabilities in Spain.
Other organizations have conducted similar studies, including on the health impacts of heatwaves, the threat of wildfire smoke and the disproportionate impacts of climate change on LGBTI people.