Despite the dangers of rights inflation, there are undoubtedly norms that should be counted as human rights but are not universally recognized as such. After all, there are many areas in which human dignity and fundamental interests are threatened by the actions and inactions of individuals and governments. Consider environmental rights, often defined as the rights of animals or even of nature itself (see the section on environmental ethics). Considered in this broad sense, environmental rights are not consistent with the general idea of human rights, because the rights holders are not people or groups of people.
However, alternative formulations are possible. A basic environmental human right can be understood as the requirement to maintain and restore an environment that is safe for human life and health. Many countries have environmental rights of this kind in their constitutional bills of rights. And the Bill of Rights of the European Union, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, contains in Article 37 a norm of environmental protection: “A high level of environmental protection and the improvement of environmental quality shall be integrated into the policies of the Union and shall be ensured in accordance with the principle of sustainable development”.
The human right to a safe environment or environmental protection does not directly address issues such as animal or biodiversity claims, although it may do so indirectly through the idea of ecosystem services for people (see Biodiversity and Human Rights. The case for a human right to a secure environment must show that environmental problems pose a serious threat to fundamental human interests, values or norms; that governments can properly be charged with the duty to protect people from these threats; and that most governments actually have the capacity to do so.
Climate change now poses a serious environmental threat to the lives and health of many people, and so it is not surprising that human rights-based approaches to climate change have been developed and promoted in recent decades (see Bodansky 2011, Gardiner 2013 and UN Human Rights and Climate Change). One approach, advocated by Steve Vanderheyden, takes the idea of a human right to an environment that is adequate for human life and health and derives from this broad right a more specific right to a stable climate. Another approach, advocated by Simon Kenny, does not require the introduction of a new environmental law. Instead, it suggests that serious action to reduce and mitigate climate change is required by already well-established human rights, since serious climate change will violate many people’s rights to life, food and health.