Climate Change and Human Rights

Climate change is often described in terms of rising temperatures, melting ice, and extreme weather. But beneath those visible signs lies a quieter transformation—one that reshapes law, redraws borders, and tests the meaning of justice itself.

This book begins with a simple but unsettling idea: climate change is not only an environmental crisis, but a human rights crisis unfolding in real time. It determines who lives in safety and who does not, who has access to water and food, and who is forced to move. It reaches into courts, constitutions, and international treaties, challenging systems built for a world that no longer exists.

From Indigenous land rights to disappearing island states, from urban inequality to corporate accountability, climate change exposes the limits of traditional legal thinking. It raises questions that law has never fully had to answer: What do we owe people who are not yet born? Can a nation exist without land? Who is responsible when harm is predictable but dispersed across millions of actors?

This book traces those questions across law, ethics, and global politics. It is not only about what climate change is doing to the world, but about what it is doing to the idea of rights itself.