Human rights–based precautionary approaches and risk imposition in the context of climate change

Human rights approaches in intergenerational justice promise to yield robust duties to current generations to combat climate change. These duties are robust, because the corresponding rights are, at least prima facie, understood as absolute rights: they cannot easily be outweighed or discounted. In a way then, rights-based accounts are too successful. Even benign actions carry the risk of violating future persons’ rights and thus we need some way to justify the imposition of risks of rights violations to future persons. In this chapter I will present 1) how contractualists conceive of rights, 2) how risk impositions are justified given that people have rights, and 3) what the actual practical consequences of this view are in intergenerational justice.