ABSTRACT
There is a general consensus throughout the scientific and international communities that the majority of climate change and other environmental harms have been caused by human behaviour, making certain severe and harmful effects imminent. Grounded in an environmental human rights framework and taking an interest theory approach to collective human rights, this chapter is concerned with questions of secondary and subsequent responsibilities for climate change – of identifying those obliged to take both the direct and indirect actions necessary to address the imminent harms. Within a cosmopolitan political or legal society, can any agents be held responsible to ensure, assist, coerce or enforce others to fulfil their own responsibilities and duties? Just as the causes and effects of these harms are accumulative, trans-temporal and transnational in nature, the responsibilities invoked by these effects are also multi-layered and concern actors ranging from individual subjects through to intergovernmental or supra-State agents. This chapter suggests there is a chain of collective responsibility - running through individuals, civil society, State and supra-State actors – with regard to taking responsibility for pre-emptive protective action against future environmental harms.
