Though climate change and human rights are important corporate responsibility issues on their own terms, they are increasingly interrelated. As our global climate destabilizes, there will be an increase in water stress, food scarcity, the prevalence and intensity of diseases, and the loss of homelands and jobs around the world. In turn, climate change is likely to affect several rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), such as the right to life and security, the right to food, and the right to health. Meanwhile, efforts to mitigate climate change are creating new human rights problems. In particular, industrializing countries like China are concerned that regulation may unjustly hamper their economic rights by preventing them from growing. (Indeed, finding common ground on this issue is largely what developing a post-Kyoto global treaty depends on.) Another challenge is that most mitigation scenarios rely on using global finance to lead carbon-reduction activities in communities where the cost of doing so is fairly low. However, this has had unintended human rights consequences for vulnerable populations in those communities. For example, there are forestry protection projects in Uganda designed to earn carbon credits, yet those same activities — aimed […]