Recent years have seen a renewed effort to adopt a Global Pact for the Environment (GPE).1 The GPE would serve the twin goals of integrating international environmental law while recognising an environmental bill of rights, including a substantive right as well as procedural rights to information, participation, and access to justice. A GPE would contribute to greater integration of international human rights law and international environmental law, promoting systemic synergies that could lead to greater effectiveness in achieving their respective goals.

The title of this volume applies the increasingly popular concept of the Anthropocene1 to what have come to be known as environmental human rights (EHRs) (Knox et al., 2018; May, 2020; May & Daly, 2014, 2019). At its core, the Anthropocene reflects the idea that the human and non-human elements of the earth system have become so completely intertwined that no change can occur in one without impact on the other (Young et al., 2017). This new state of affairs imposes upon us a responsibility our species has never faced – that of determining both own our fate and the fate of all living things, and the role that law plays in the mix of environmental law and governance (Kotzé, 2017). However, with great responsibility sometimes comes great opportunity. If every environmental challenge is now also a human challenge, it may be that human interests and the interests of the non-human (or, more-than-human) environment are gradually converging (Baber & Bartlett, 2015). If so, then the protection of human rights may afford new opportunities to protect the environment (and vice versa). It remains to be seen whether we are astute enough to recognise those opportunities and take advantage of them.

The human rights language and commitments in the Paris Agreement and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) matter for the success of these agreements. Human rights provide a “moral dimension” pushing environmental and sustainability efforts beyond technocratic monitoring, providing aspirational components necessary to realise the transformative potential of the task (Immler & Sakkers, 2021, p. 3). Human rights also provide a common global language and framework for ensuring that environmental and development initiatives are truly sustainable in human terms.

More than fifty years after Christopher Stone (1972) suggested that natural objects should have legal rights, we have seen a rise in the recognition of environmental rights (Boyd, 2012; Sanders, 2018). Whether we call this a wave, trend or “a rights revolution” matters little. There has in any case been a rise in public attention and a wave of academic writings about environmental rights.

The Anthropocene won’t be ignored but doesn’t care if it is. Headlines tumble out one after another, revealing disaster in every part of our environment: one day we learn that eight million tons of plastic are put into the world’s oceans every year, and as we try to comprehend the magnitude of that, we hear about the seemingly intractable air pollution in the world’s largest cities (UN, 2020, 2021). And then there’s climate change, which is raising global temperatures, warming and acidifying oceans, melting glaciers and ice caps, and wreaking havoc on weather patterns. June 2021 was the hottest month in recorded history. The Anthropocene is here and it is us, human rights be damned.

As the chapters of this book recount, the last few decades have witnessed increasing communion between the fields of environmental law and human rights. Traditionally, the field of environmental law serves to achieve desired ecological conditions, such as clean air, water, and land and is captured by more than 500 international agreements, many of the world’s constitutions, and in countless laws and regulations and local ordinances around the world. Human rights, on the other hand, serve to advance desired human conditions, including civil rights such as voting and socioeconomic rights such as health or education, again through a combination of international, regional, and municipal legal pproaches. Yet what work can the legal order do to address the Anthropocene?

The direct and coherent effort to secure environmental human rights is a relatively new feature of the international scene. If an official birthday were needed, the appointment of Professor John Knox as the United Nations’ first Independent Expert on Human Rights and the Environment in 2012 would serve. However, a persuasive argument could be made that the environmental human rights (EHR) movement can trace its lineage back at least to the environmental justice movement (EJ) of the late 1970s (Bullard, 1994). Some might date the movement even earlier or find its precursors elsewhere in the world. I shall not pursue those points here, because my purpose in invoking the environmental justice movement lies not in genealogy but rather comparative anatomy.

The Polar ice caps shrink, ocean currents change, sea level rises and trees flower sooner than expected. Although scientific evidence proves that, owing to anthropogenic activities,1 air temperature is on track to increase beyond 2°C above pre-industrial levels by 2084 (Wang et al., 2018, p. 761) and the time window for addressing the problem is fast shrinking (IPCC, 2018, p. 112; IPCC, 2021, p. 8), all UNFCCC Conferences of the Parties have thus far failed to establish an effective regulatory system. There are indeed States that emit 6,457 million metric tons of CO2 per year (Ritchie & Roser, 2019, CO2 Emissions Per Capita), causing the polar regions to warm twice as fast as the rest of the world (Year of Polar Prediction, 2017).

The recognition of the Anthropocene casts stark light upon the impact of human activity on our environment. In so doing, it frames the way in which we must now view and manage our relationship with the environment, creating an imperative that we adopt an approach that holds human and environmental interests and rights in balance. Without that, we leave the future of the planet and all its inhabitants in jeopardy. Part of this requires a reconsideration of how we approach the relationship between human rights and the environment.

Indigenous rights in Canada have developed as legal opportunity structures over the last six decades, achieving specific milestones such as improved access to courts, litigation cost rules (assisting Indigenous rights holders) and increased “legal stock” of case precedents Formatting– (Baber & Bartlett, 2019). Indigenous rights are intertwined with considerations of Mother Earth and the environment, but more importantly Indigenous sovereignty and political opportunity. Advancing Indigenous rights symbiotically advances alternative framings of rights of the environment, exposes historic and current power structures, and offers opportunities for complementary environmental and Indigenous goals. The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and its implementation in Canada is increasing symbiotically environmental rights opportunity structures. However, more can be done.

One of the defining characteristics of the Anthropocene, characterised by a new and destructive human–nature relationship, is that for the first time in humanity’s history, the access to a clean and healthy environment is uncertain for large groups of persons and ecosystems. This transformational shift in humankind’s relationship to nature was the catalyst for a debate between scholars, policy-makers and environmental and human rights activists on whether there is a right to the environment and who would be the right and duty holders. To the extent that the intrinsic value and agency of nature is recognised, there is also the related question of the rights of nature, or the right of the environment not to suffer the effects of the Anthropocene.

Despite the growing recognition of environmental rights as a key means of protecting human rights from environmental harm, the rights of future generations to be protected from environmental harm have so far been neglected. Environmental problems like climate change, landfill, toxic waste, air and water pollution, depletion of aquifers, and deforestation all have effects that will persist for decades. Environmental destruction from natural and manmade disasters can occur rapidly and cause irreparable harm to natural and cultural heritage. Concepts of sustainable development and the precautionary principle, notwithstanding their long standing as pillars of international environmental law, have failed to prevent large-scale, long-term environmental damage and associated impacts on human rights. To protect the interests of future generations effectively, environmental human rights frameworks need justiciable rights that protect against long-term environmental harm accompanied by principles and processes to enable legal enforcement of those rights.