AAAS Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Program

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Report on Science and Human Rights

Summer 2003 Vol XXIII, No. 2

Anya Ferring
SHR Intern

Rapid industrialization and urbanization affect populations in more complex and interrelated ways now than ever before. Human rights and environmental groups have increasingly begun to realize the importance of consolidating their goals of protecting human rights and the environment through ensuring healthy and safe living conditions for all people.

Environmentalists are now analyzing the negative effects on health caused by human induced environmental destruction by implementing a rights-based approach. A rights-based approach focuses on the most marginalized and vulnerable groups, particularly children, and recognizes that it is these groups that are often the first and most severely exposed during environmental-based trauma.

Likewise, human rights groups are also beginning to acknowledge that many injustices committed against humanity are environmental in scope. For example, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), respiratory infections and diarrheal disease are the primary causes of death among the poorest twenty percent of the world’s population, particularly children. These maladies are not life threatening and could be easily prevented through providing a safe environment. Respiratory infections occur as a result of burning wood, dung, and coal in inefficient stoves within poorly ventilated homes; diarrhea can be easily prevented simply through the provision of clean water and adequate sanitation facilities.

Policymakers and the international community have also begun to acknowledge the inherent intersections in the areas of environment and human rights through the occurrence of environmental-related health concerns, and have pledged to collaborate on global commitments to eradicate such injustices. Today, the culmination of this discussion is most prevalent regarding the right to water, as lack of clean water resources and sanitation facilities accounts for one of the most serious environmental health problems faced today, especially for populations residing in developing regions.

For example, the United Nations Millennium Project, a global research network commissioned to advise the UN on best strategies for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, has set one of its targets to reduce by half the number of people without access to clean drinking water by 2015. In November of 2002, the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights took the monumental step of declaring access to water a human right. The Committee stated that “[Water] is a prerequisite for the realization of other human rights,” recognizing that one of the most basic tenets of human rights is that all human beings have a right to those things which are essential to life. In March of 2003, policymakers, academics, and others involved in water-related fields met in Kyoto, Japan to participate in the Third World Water Forum. In addition to raising the profile of water issues worldwide, the forum also stimulated debate and action among many sectors of government and society on how to best remedy some of the most pressing issues facing the world today.

Corresponding with the global push to address emerging human rights and environmental issues, AAAS has been active in a variety of pursuits. In April of 2003 AAAS in conjunction with the Center for Human Rights and Environment organized a follow-up event to the 3rd World Water Forum entitled “The Right to Water: The Kyoto Agenda and Beyond.” Throughout the event, participants identified the primary issues central to water and human rights in regard to policymaking, advocacy, and future collaborations.

The AAAS Science and Human Rights Program has also continued to add resources to its website on human rights and the environment. The Environment and Human Rights Resources website (http://shr.aaas.org/hrenv/resources.html), a component of the Environment and Human Rights Project, is an online database containing resource information on human rights, environmental protection, and further information on the common links between them. The database allows environment and human rights groups to develop an understanding of their common ground and of the knowledge, methods, and resources that each group brings to its work while improving the ability of both to realize their shared goal of a world that sustainably shelters and nurtures human as well as non-human life. ¨