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8 Obiter Dicta
Healthy Climate, Health Lives:
Connecting Climate Change and Health in the Paris Agreement
This article was published as part of the Osgoode chapter of Canadian L aw yers for International Human
Rights (CLAIHR) media series, which aims to promote an awareness of international human rights issues.
-Jerico Espinas
Between 30 November to 11 December 2015, 195
countries as well as thousands of international organizations, activist groups, and spectators gathered
in Paris in order to discuss how the international
community will address climate change. The UN
conference culminated in the adoption of the Paris
Agreement on 12 December 2015. This document
legally obligates countries to limit the effects of climate change using a number of different agreed-upon
Articles.
The central clause of the Paris Agreement is Article
2, which limits the climate change temperature
increase to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial
levels and recognizes the need to only increase the
temperature by 1.5 degrees. The agreed-upon strategies include the preservation of forests from degradation in Article 5, the mobilization of funds from
developed to developing countries in order to facilitate compliance with the Paris Agreement in Article
9, and the creation of an international transparency framework in Article 13. The Paris Agreement
officially comes into effect in 2020, though the
Agreement includes certain clauses that guide how
countries should prepare between 2016 and 2020.
The UN climate change conference was a landmark
meeting not only because it created the most recent
international agreement to limit climate change, but
also because it included a number of international
panels in the days leading up to the Agreement. These
events addressed a number of key issues that many
in the international community felt were not meaningfully included in other conferences. One of these
issues was the relationship between climate change
and health.
On 9 December 2 01 5, the World Health
Organization (WHO) lead a panel called “Why the
Climate Change Agreement is Critical to Public
Health.” Additionally, the Scientific Centre of
Monaco, the Europe office of the WHO, and the
Health and Environmental Alliance (HEAL) lead
another panel called, “Health Central to Climate
Change Action.”
The panels stressed that climate change deeply
affects the environmental determinants of health,
with speakers from both events stating how longlasting temperature increases turned into a deadly
heatwave that killed seventy thousand people in
Europe in 2003. The panels also discussed heightened
food and water insecurity due to droughts, increased
weather disasters like tsunamis, and expanded territories for vector-borne diseases. These discussions
emphasized the causal link between climate change
and health outcomes.
Importantly, many mentioned the human right
to health and its connection to environmental determinants of health, in turn establishing the normative link between health and climate change. For
example, the Stockholm Declaration on the Human
Environment in 1972 held that “[mankind] has a fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate
conditions of life, in an environment of a quality that
permits a life of dignity and well-being.” This clause
is closely connected to the International Covenant on
Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights’ recognition of
“the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of
physical and mental health” as a human right; ensuring the right to quality health will almost certainly
require ensuring the right to a quality environment.
Both panels discussed different strategies to
address climate change by incorporating environmentally-conscious frameworks into countries’
healthcare policies. Stana Bozovc, the State Secretary
of the Ministry of Agriculture and Environmental
Protection in Serbia, suggested the importance of
intersectional coordination. For example, countries
could integrate walking, cycling, and other healthy
transportation alternatives to their urban planning
initiatives. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the
WHO, wanted countries to be more pro-active in preparing for health outcomes related to climate change,
acknowledging that there will still be some negative
side-effects due to climate change. She suggested the
implementation of an early-warning system and the
increase of sanitation and hygiene services in order
to improve healthcare resilience to weather disasters.
The Paris Agreement recognized, at least in part,
the importance of these panel discussions by international health leaders. The Agreement’s preamble acknowledges the intersection between climate
change and human rights, including not only the
human right to health but also the human rights
afforded to Indigenous peoples, migrants, children,
and women. However, while this clause urged countries to “respect, promote and consider their respective obligations,” countries are not legally bound to
do so. Additionally, health was not mentioned at all
in any of the twenty-nine Articles that legally comprised the international community’s joint response
to climate change.
Although the Paris Agreement’s acknowledgement
of the connection between climate change and health
is a significan BFWfV