Climate Change: Building Resilience While Protecting Human Rights

Overview

Human rights and climate change are inextricably linked. The impacts of rising global temperatures—natural disasters, the proliferation of vector-borne diseases, climate migration, famine, and drought—negatively impact many human rights, such as rights to shelter, natural resources, mobility, health, employment, and livelihoods.

Whether caused by physical climate impacts (e.g., extreme weather events, flooding, heat stress, the spread of disease) or climate solutions themselves (e.g., communities excluded or left behind as companies install new infrastructure as part of their transition to a net-zero economy), climate change has disproportionate impacts on poor and marginalized communities, and it exacerbates the underlying systemic inequities that these communities already face.

As climate change magnifies inequalities and vulnerabilities, protection of human rights becomes even more urgent: where human rights protections are weak, individuals and communities are less able to adapt and build resilience to climate impacts.

Why This Matters for Business

The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) serve as the primary internationally accepted framework for standards and practice regarding human rights and business. According to the UNGPs, companies have a responsibility to respect human rights, which requires that companies (a) avoid causing or contributing to adverse human rights impacts through their own activities and address such impacts when they occur and (b) seek to prevent or mitigate adverse human rights impacts that are directly linked to their operations, products, or services by their business relationships, even if they have not contributed to those impacts.

In the context of climate change, this means that companies have:

1. A responsibility to address human rights impacts related to their physical climate impacts;
2. A responsibility to address human rights impacts related to their transition to a low-carbon economy; and
3. An opportunity to promote the realization, fulfillment, and enjoyment of rights in a resilient world.

The table below illustrates how physical climate impacts, transition risks, and transition opportunities should be considered in the context of a company’s climate and human rights strategy.

A Changing Landscape

While we know that climate impacts will increase, how and where climate impacts manifest is extremely uncertain. To adequately prepare for and address these impacts in an uncertain future, business should use a foresight-driven approach to factor the changing macro context into the design of robust policies, strategies, and programs. This includes considering early stage “signals of change,” which could mature in ways that will require rethinking approaches to address climate change and human rights challenges. For example:

• Climate litigation targets business: Between 2017 and 2020, climate litigation globally doubled. Cases are increasingly targeting corporate entities.
• Climate refugees: In January 2020, the United Nations Human Rights Committee ruled that it is unlawful for governments to return people to countries where their lives might be threatened by the climate crisis.
• Growing vulnerabilities of the precariat: COVID-19 has left gig economy workers and the informal labor sector highly vulnerable. These risks will be amplified with more frequent climate-related disruptions.
• Emergency surveillance: Vaccine certificates and tracking apps are being launched to host individuals’ health or vaccination status and permit access to everything, from international travel to their workplace. As governments struggle to contain COVID-19, many will face mounting pressure to bypass privacy and restrict civil liberties as they attempt to control and end the pandemic. Temporary abrogations may become permanent. Crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic will only become more frequent with climate change, and profound disruptions caused by climate impacts will intensify questions about the best balance between individual liberties and collective security.
• The link between climate change and gender-based violence: Climate-related disasters are exacerbating gender inequality and is leading to increases in incidences of gender-based violence.
• Dirty supply chains powering clean energy: Infrastructure and technologies needed to power the transition to a low-carbon future depend on complex supply chains with problematic social and environmental impacts.
• The data deficit for AI and climate change: AI and big data will be essential to mitigate climate impacts and improve resilience. However, in developing countries, there is often a lack of data generation and poor data collection and/or management practices, resulting in a data deficit.
• The rights of nature: To protect their rivers from pollution, encroachment and illegal dredging, some countries have granted certain rivers the legal status of living entities. This has raised questions about how to balance human rights with environmental rights as the concept of “environmental personhood” gains traction, and rivers, lakes, mountains, etc., are granted the same rights as people.

Developing a Resilient Response

The emerging issues above could manifest in a variety of ways, depending on the industry and how the global economy and international geopolitical environment evolve over time. To build resilient strategies that address and mitigate the human rights harms associated with the climate impacts of business operations and strategic climate initiatives, companies will need to embed responses to key risks and opportunities that consider the emerging future. BSR’s research identified five strategic “hotspots” with the potential to create adverse human rights impacts that companies should consider as they build out their strategies.

• Disruption and shifts in the value chain will lead to new vulnerabilities for business and workers.
• Automation will lead to efficiency gains as well as questions around the future of work.
• Data collection will become increasingly widespread.
• Precarious employment situations will lead to considerable risks related to the rights of workers and worker protection.
• Shifts in the reporting landscape will lead to new and/or evolving regulations and standards on human rights reporting practices and policies.

Recommendations

By taking these signals of change and strategic “hotspots” into consideration, companies can begin to prepare for adverse climate and human rights impacts across their value chains. To create long-term, resilient business strategies, companies should: