Climate Change, Human Rights and Justice

The project includes further development of the Greenhouse Development Rights (GDR) framework, which has helped make SEI an important voice on climate and equity, as well as capacity- and network-building and outreach.

We are refining the GDR framework by making it more closely reflect the state of negotiations, incorporating cost data into burden-sharing metrics, implementing alternate metrics of capacity and alternative models of progressivity, and updating our analysis of global budgets and trajectories to match alternative global climate objectives (e.g., 350 ppm).

In addition, we are working to further connect human rights and climate policy, leveraging the fact that human rights provide an underutilised set of universal norms that raise basic needs to entitlement status, are legally binding rather than morally persuasive vis-à-vis states, and provide prevention and enforcement mechanisms already known to policymakers and tested before tribunals. For example, we are exploring whether human rights reasoning would support conclusions about international legal responsibilities to vulnerable populations, and we are exploring means by which to use human rights thresholds to make operational concepts of human rights and equity in climate financing.

Leveraging the considerable interest expressed in GDR, we are also working to extend our engagement in post-Copenhagen discussions, developing a streamlined approach to provide country-level case studies and an online tool to compare and evaluate alternative burden-sharing frameworks. In addition, we continue to engage with civil society organizations that have adopted a GDR analysis of national obligations, providing technical analyses at the request of policymakers, and engaging with emerging discussions of consumption-based perspectives of national emissions.