William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review
Abstract
Around the world, there is growing concern that phenomena related to climate change may render coastal areas unlivable in the coming years and decades. Scientific projections indicate that with high greenhouse gas emissions, sea levels may rise upwards of 6 feet by 2100. Studies repeatedly warn that—absent steep and urgent global emissions reductions— places where hundreds of millions of people currently live will be below projected high tide lines for 2100.
In many coastal areas, climate change often impacts historically marginalized, racialized, and low-income communities first and worst. Such communities are often located in more vulnerable areas like flood plains. At the same time, they typically have less access to the financial resources and political capital that are necessary to adapt to the changing climate. Unfortunately, government adaptation plans often overlook or exclude such communities, prioritizing instead the protection of areas with higher property values.
Coastal communities also protect and rely on critical coastal ecosystems, including mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, salt marshes, and coral reefs. The importance of those ecosystems, known as “coastal blue carbon ecosystems”, in sequestering and storing carbon is increasingly recognized. The ecosystem services provided by these delicate and interrelated geographies cannot be overstated: they nurture and preserve coastal biodiversity, clean the water, and protect the land and communities that inhabit it from storms, flooding, and erosion.
In response to the pressures of environmental destruction and a changing climate, legal innovations are emerging to address associated harms and injustices. International human rights law, in particular, is responding to the risks to coastal communities and other climate-related human rights threats with evolving ideas of what rights protections entail. This Article identifies four legal innovations in international human rights law that could be mobilized to protect coastal communities from, or in the context of, climate-related displacement, and uses illustrative cases from the Americas to analyze how these developments can help bridge the gap between lived realities and international law. Part I will address the rights to a healthy environment and to a healthy climate. Part II will discuss the right to stay. Part III will then analyze the rights of nature and ecosystems. Finally, Part IV will address planned relocation frameworks. For each of these innovations, the Article explains the law underlying these developments and provides examples of how they could be applied to coastal communities.
This abstract has been taken from the author's introduction.