This chapter charts the increasing currency of human rights discourses and the appetite among States to integrate human rights language in the international climate change regime, from the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to the 2015 Paris Agreement. The chapter examines the references to human rights and interests (albeit not framed in rights language) in the 1992 UNFCCC negotiated at Rio, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and conferences of Parties’ decisions under these instruments, in particular the 2010 Cancun Agreements. It also explores the discussion and debate in the lead-up to and in the Paris Climate Conference on various human rights, drawing on the submissions of Parties in the four-year negotiating process from Durban in 2011 to Paris in 2015. It deconstructs the preambular reference to human rights in the Paris Agreement, and identifies complementary provisions that have human rights dimensions. Although the Paris Agreement does not explicitly endorse a right to a healthy environment, the inclusion of rights language in relation to climate impacts strengthens the argument that such a right may be closer to acknowledgement at the international level.
