A livable planet : human rights in the global economy

"This book argues for a targeted human rights approach, assigning enhanced priority to a bundle of rights, strategically important for counteracting ecologically unsustainable, economically predatory market practices that threaten our ability to maintain a livable planet. Specifically, it calls for enhanced protection for dual-purpose human rights. They not only secure the very basic elements of well-being that ground many of those rights. They perform their normative function, in significant part, by imposing duties on states to protect the ecological conditions that sustain human life and make possible the satisfaction of basic needs and by giving individual right-holders more control over their ecological futures. High-priority, dual-purpose rights include rights of subsistence, food, water, and rights that protect against serious environmental health risks and ecological degradation. Climate disruption is perhaps the most obvious example of the rapidly unfolding ecological destruction unleashed by the scale, pace, and character of human impact on the rest of nature. However, humanity faces a more encompassing ecological predicament, consisting of a cluster of concurrent, mutually reinforcing crises. The cluster also includes land-system change resulting in deforestation and soil degradation, loss of biodiversity and biosphere integrity, alteration of biogeochemical cycles, and decreased freshwater availability. Individually and in combination, they pose civilizational threats of such magnitude and complexity that they challenge the ability of individuals to comprehend them and the capacities of institutions to respond."