The right to a healthy environment and social and economic rights—responding to climate change in Australia

Abstract

ABSTRACT The United Nations General Assembly recently recognised the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. This new right offers to reorient human rights to better address the interdependent relationship of humans and the environment. At the same time, it provides a novel lens to ensure that laws related to the environment account for injustices confronting humans within it. In the context of climate change, and the complex inequalities that it generates, environmental and human rights laws are converging. Social and economic rights, while limited and underexplored in Australia, offer some possibilities, in concert with the right to a healthy environment, to tackle climate injustices. The article suggests that efforts to realise the right to a healthy environment, including via existing legislative articulations of social and economic rights, may provide both opportunities for direct impact through the courts and, more indirectly, support an ontological reframing of the law’s conception of the environment and our relationship with it.