environmental rights
everyone has the right to natural resources and a safe environment.
What are environmental rights?
Environmental rights are often considered a part of the third generation of human rights.
These are protecting the people and the mother earth by strengthening natural resource rights and ensuring that everyone has the information, voice, and power to shape environmental decision-making.
Moreover, these are rights that mankind requires and deserves. To have the right to food, clean water, suitable shelter, and education, having a safe and sustainable environment is essential as all other rights are dependent upon it.
The goal to ensure access for all of Earth’s inhabitants to the essential standard of living is the primary concern of environmental rights.
The right to a healthy environment has gained constitutional recognition and protection in more than 100 states. The strongest form of legal protection available.
Why are environmental rights important?
About two-thirds of the constitutional rights refer to a healthy environment; alternative formulations include rights to a clean, safe, favorable, wholesome, or ecologically balanced environment. They also include the right for a certain beetle to survive or the right for an individual to enjoy an unspoiled landscape.
Yet, despite near-universal recognition of both substantive and procedural environmental rights across international agreements and national laws, progress following through on these commitments has fallen short.
