Human Rights Responding to Planetary Crises

Can human rights meet the triple planetary crisis? A multidisciplinary assessment across governance, litigation, and civic action.

Essential reading for students and scholars of human rights, environmental law, and global politics. This timely volume examines to what extent human rights can rise to meet the climate, biodiversity, and pollution crises. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.The triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution poses an existential challenge to human societies - and to human rights scholarship. This timely and ambitious volume asks whether human rights offer a meaningful response, and if so, how that potential can be realised. Bringing together scholars from across International Relations, Law, Political Science, Geography, and Sociology, the book offers a multidisciplinary assessment organised around three pillars: governance, litigation, and civic action. Case studies span the Global North and South, from global governance institutions to indigenous communities in the DRC, from climate migrants to Norwegian diplomats. The volume's conclusion is sober: the pace of change lags dangerously behind the urgency of the crises we face. Human rights do not offer a ready-made solution, but a vital common language for accountability and transformation. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.