Description
This book is about the big issue in the transition to sustainability – the linking of equity with sustainability. No longer is it tolerable to focus only on environmental impact. Development must be approached and financed through the triple lens of environmental, social and economic sustainability.
The message is one which courts will have to increasingly address, whether they are enforcing laws which governments have enacted, enforcing European Union law against their domestic governments or, more innovatively, finding in general domestic principles a basis for ordering further governmental action.
The UK Supreme Court recently made a mandatory order that the secretary of state prepare new air quality plans under Article 23(1) of Directive 2008/50/EC in accordance with a defined timetable to lead to revised plans being submitted to the European Commission not later than 31 December 2015. This followed the United Kingdom’s failure to reduce nitrogen dioxide levels to the levels prescribed by the Directive. A court in The Hague recently held that plans by the Dutch government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 by only 14–17 per cent compared to 1990 levels were unlawful under the general law of tort, having regard to the scale of the threat posed by such emissions, and that the Dutch government should instead reduce emissions by at least 25 per cent by the end of 2020. Its reasoning was expressly inspired by general constitutional, international legal and human rights principles and by its conviction that, as an industrialized country, the Netherlands must contribute towards the solution of a worldwide problem.
The essential background to the present book is Dr Damilola S. Olawuyi’s doctoral degree in energy and environmental law from the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, and his extensive international experience as an academic and legal practitioner. The work is an innovative and valuable study of the human rights implications of climate change and carbon projects. Its starting point, supported by examples, is that development projects can violate human rights – in some cases even though these may have been conceived and supported in order to reduce carbon emissions. His thesis is that, what is required under international and national law is an approach recognizing human rights considerations at the heart of any development project.
Dr Olawuyi supports the view that all human rights – political, civil, social, cultural and economic – are equal in importance and none can be fully enjoyed without the others: ‘without a belly full of food and other vital needs, human rights and fundamental freedoms become meaningless’.1 But, at the same time, there needs to be ‘a holistic approach that mainstreams human rights norms into environmental planning to avoid situations whereby governmental policies or project, for example in the areas of climate change mitigation impact, threaten social, economic and cultural rights’.2
The thread running through the book is human rights mainstreaming – the concept of embedding human rights norms in the design, finance and implementation of carbon projects, advocated by the United Nations for nearly twenty years (and echoed recently in the Pope’s encyclical ‘Laudato Si‘ – Care of our common home’ addressed to ‘every person living on this planet’). Rather than an approach involving the recognition or expansion of substantive rights, Dr Damilola Olawuyi focuses on a procedural approach to the achievement of such integration – better access to information, wider public participation, greater attention to the needs to ensure equality and avoid discrimination, improved accountability and monitoring, always backed by access to justice.
The book discusses what this means in practical terms – an expanded role for bodies presently engaged in screening carbon projects, a requirement for a specific human rights impact assessment, review mechanisms, better governance and compliance and complaints committees.
Dr Damilola Olawuyi has written a clear, well-informed and well-documented work, in a field which should and does engage all of us evermore. If the world continues as it is, there may, as a commentator quoted in one footnote observes, come a time when the only habitable place is the Antarctic.3 This study will stimulate thinking not only about how to avoid that drastic infringement of all our human rights but about a whole range of potential infringements which carbon projects threaten in our present everyday existence. The author’s skill and initiative in researching and writing it are to be commended. It will be an important stimulus for governments, peoples, industrial, commercial and non-governmental organizations worldwide involved in or affected by carbon and other environmental projects.
The Right Honourable the Lord Jonathan Hugh Mance
Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom
Chair, International Law Association