ABSTRACT
Human rights not only protect individuals from discrimination and abuse but also, increasingly, ensure human survival, including access to food, water, shelter, and health. The right to health, as laid out in articles 12 and 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN, 1948), has received much attention, particularly in response to the global AIDS pandemic (Mann, Gruskin, Grodin, and Annas, 1999). Global climate change is increasingly recognized as another international crisis, with implications for positive human rights outlined in a long list of international covenants, declarations, treaties, and agreements. While this chapter focuses on the human rights dimension of climate change, understanding the chemistry and physics of climate change is important to appreciating the severity of the situation in which we – and that means all of us on the planet – nd ourselves. A very readable introduction to all dimensions of the problem can be found in Danny Chivers’ (2010) No-Nonsense Guide to Climate Change.
