Strengthening Environmental Rights and Protections within Development Law and Policy: A Vehicle for Mainstreaming Climate Action in Southeast Asia

The impacts of climate change traverse almost all areas of public policy. It is the interdisciplinary nature of climate change implications that has global policy leaders calling for the realignment of public policy with climate goals in accelerating the transition to a low carbon economy. This mandates the consideration of avenues other than siloed climate change law-making and policymaking in order to effectively mainstream climate change considerations into already embedded and accepted regulatory regimes and policymaking processes. The inference or insertion of environmental rights protections offers just one mechanism by which this can take hold. This is because human rights that are inextricably linked to environmental qualities are directly impacted by climate change and thereby carry with them the recognition and consideration of climate change mitigation and adaptation in order for their full and proper protection. Development policy and law already imports social and environmental impacts considerations, and thereby offers a medium through which such environmental rights protections can be transported. It is on this basis that this article looks to an environmental rights justification for the reform of development law and policy in mainstreaming positive climate change action. Examining the capacity of Myanmar’s draft environmental impact assessment procedure to afford environmental rights protections by way of example, this article builds on the current trends in climate change law-making discourse in Southeast Asia; being one that includes the reconstruction of established regulatory frameworks to incorporate a climate change agenda.