Abstract:

Climate change is a global problem. Food, water, health, housing, and life are basic individual human rights. However, between the global forces of climate change and individual challenges of meeting basic needs, communities are the context in which people experience the effects of climate change and seek to adapt to its impact on their livelihoods. Such adaptation may include permanent migration and certainly, this has been one of the foci of international relations and security politics related to climate change. Of course, such migration will have human rights consequences and there are human rights causes to some of this migration as well. Of equal importance, but gaining less attention, are the problems related to climate change effects that do not cause mass migration, that may include short-term seasonal migration, and that also have human rights causes and consequences. In this chapter, we use a study in rural Bangladesh to demonstrate the import of the human rights considerations of this second, community-level, impact of climate change on human rights. We find that the human rights impacts of slow and rapid onset environmental change are a function of democratic, social, and economic rights, that is, those human rights that are best understood as enjoyed through political community are equally worthy of our rights attention because they are essential to climate change adaptation.