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the Report
Integrating Environment and Health with Human Rights
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. ¨
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