This post launches a new Digital Symposium, Climate Change and Health: Mobilizing Public International Law into Action by Guest Editors Thalia Viveros Uehara and Alicia Ely Yamin. Check back for more posts twice a week!
The election of Donald J. Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and in his prior administration pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, has sent shock waves through government and civil society leaders gathered at COP29. Argentina has walked away from the negotiations. Meanwhile, top leaders from the world’s largest polluting nations have not attended. COP29 was supposed to mobilize commitments to finance climate action as well as solidify the growing “health turn” within the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), including WHO guidance on integrating health into Nationally Determined Contributions. But that progress seems now in jeopardy.
This digital symposium makes clear that stakes could not be higher for global health. Projections estimate that between 2030 and 2050, climate-related health impacts could lead to an additional 250,000 deaths per year, largely from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress. Furthermore, mental health conditions are worsening as extreme weather, livelihood losses, and wildfire smoke increase trauma.
As the diverse perspectives featured in this symposium attest, the growing recognition of the health impacts of climate change has influenced public international law. Under the UNFCCC, health has moved from a peripheral to a central issue — notably since COP16 promoted health-inclusive national adaptation plans (NAPs) and the 2015 Paris Agreement acknowledged the right to health in its preamble. The health-climate link has also gained prominence in human rights law.
The right to health is enshrined widely in both international and regional human rights treaties. More recently, the right to a healthy environment has emerged as one of the fastest adopted rights across a series of binding instruments and non-binding political declarations. At the global level, the health-climate nexus gained prominence with the U.N. Human Rights Council’s 2008 Resolution 7/23, which acknowledged climate change as a threat to health, and the 2016 Analytical Study on their relationship.
At the regional level, human rights have provided a powerful motivation for groups to mobilize and press for health to take precedence in laws and policies. Latin America has been at the forefront of developing legal standards and judicializing the right to a healthy environment in relation to health-related rights. Since the 1992 Rio de Janeiro U.N. Conference on the Environment, many countries in the region have created environmental ministries and monitoring institutions and have passed domestic legislation. The 1997 Protocol of San Salvador to the American Convention on Human Rights was the first international instrument to formally enshrine environmental rights. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights provided an important Advisory Opinion on state obligations with respect to environmental rights (Advisory Opinion 23/2017) before the U.N. Human Rights Council and the U.N. General Assembly recognized the right to a health environment. The binding regional Escazú Agreement (2018), which has been ratified by 25 countries in the region, sets progressive standards for environmental regulation and biodiversity and protections for environmental defenders.
Nonetheless, these normative advances at regional and global levels must be seen against the backdrop of what philosopher Nancy Fraser has called a “multifaceted crisis,” with economic, political, social, and ecological dimensions that all affect health. In the world today, the top 1% of the global population own nearly as much wealth as the rest of the world, and are responsible for approximately two-thirds of the carbon emissions on the planet. The predatory financialized capitalism that has enabled this savage inequality has entrenched an extractivist political economy, which is evident not just in gluttony for fossil fuels and agricultural practices that poison workers and food chains, but also in precarious labor conditions, unremunerated care work, housing priced out of reach by private equity speculation, and the hollowing out of health and social support systems, among other things. All of these structural forces, of course, have gendered and racialized effects. This is the essence of what this symposium’s contributions aim to illuminate.
In her post, Cecile de Villiers highlights how South Africa’s rise in informal employment increases health vulnerabilities to climate impacts, with outdoor workers facing extreme heat without regulated shifts or safety nets, a gap ignored in the country’s NAP. Also writing from Africa, Eunice Musiime, Faith Lumonya, and Esther Wambui Kimani emphasize how climate change exacerbates sexual and reproductive health challenges for marginalized African women and girls. They call for intersectional approaches within the Lima Work Programme on Gender, its Gender Action Plan, and Article 7 of the Paris Agreement, guided by frameworks such as the Sendai Framework and Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women General Recommendation No. 37, to ensure resilient health systems and inclusive disaster policies.
Nairita Roy Chaudhuri examines how climate change-driven droughts in rural India disproportionately burden women tasked with managing water security and unpaid reproductive labor. Through a feminist political ecology lens, she critiques international instruments like the Paris Agreement for prioritizing economic growth over rural women’s health and livelihoods, urging adaptation strategies centered on life rights and social equity.
Writing from Latin America, Cristina Rosero-Arteaga addresses the harmful impacts of agrotoxics, linking their use to environmental degradation, climate change, and severe reproductive health risks for rural women. She calls for stronger human rights protections and adherence to U.N. recommendations on the intersectional impacts of agrotoxic exposure. In Brazil, Danielle Hanna Rached and Denise Vitale assess President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s climate leadership in the context of a second Donald Trump presidency. They write that while Lula emphasizes environmental protection and Indigenous rights, challenges persist due to economic reliance on resource exploitation and resistance from a conservative Congress advancing anti-environmental legislation, complicating efforts to counter Trump’s influence on the global climate agenda.
Finally, writing about the U.K., Rosella De Falco examines how climate change deepens health inequalities, disproportionately harming marginalized groups. Citing the U.K.’s obligations under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, she advocates for stronger climate measures to mitigate risks from extreme weather, air pollution, and inadequate housing.
While the health turn within the UNFCCC and the recognition of the health-climate nexus in human rights law are both promising, they fall short of dismantling the systemic roots of health vulnerability entrenched by predatory capitalism. The symposium contributions make clear that we need to do more than decry reactionary climate denialism; timorous business-as-usual approaches will not adequately protect diverse people’s health and human rights.
As COP29 negotiates revisions, assesses progress, and renews action plans, this symposium calls attention to critical blind spots and potential synergies, offering pathways to confront the deeply gendered and racialized erosion of health and social systems.
Thalia Viveros Uehara is Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and Postdoctoral Researcher at Tilburg Law School, Tilburg University.
Alicia Ely Yamin J.D., M.P.H., Ph.D. is a Lecturer on Law and the Director of the Global Health and Rights Project at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and Adjunct Senior Lecturer on Health Policy and Management at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health; as well as Visiting Professor of Law at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina.