Climate change and the right to a healthy environment

The chapter focuses on the right to a healthy environment, suggesting that we should get rid of a strict anthropocentric approach and embrace ecocentric considerations in order to protect the environment per se and for the existence of humanity itself. She relies on the Advisory Opinion rendered by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2017 and builds a strong argument in favour of the consolidation of a right to a healthy environment combined with the rights of the nature.

This chapter argues that climate change must be addressed as an international human rights issue and that a shift of paradigm is required from a mere anthropocentric to a more eco-centric approach, through which it is possible to acknowledge the consolidation of a right to healthy environment in the context of the rights of the nature. Healthy environment is meant for the purpose of this article also as “healthy” ecosystems.