The right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment

Everyone deserves to live in a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. 

 

The right to a healthy environment can lead to the prevention of some of the millions of premature deaths caused annually by air pollution and a decrease of water pollution.

 

The right to a healthy environment includes substantive rights such as the right to clean air, a safe climate, access to safe water and adequate sanitation, healthy and sustainably produced food, a non-toxic environment to live in, work, study, and play, and healthy biodiversity and ecosystems. 

 

The right to a healthy environment also entails procedural rights, namely access to environmental information, public participation in environmental decision-making, and access to justice and effective remedies in environmental matters.

 

States at the United Nations Human Rights Council (resolution 48/13, October 2021) and at the General Assembly (resolution 76/300, July 2022) have recognized the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment as a human right for all. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has confirmed that children have the right to a healthy environment (General comment n°26, August 2023).

 

There is a growing consensus in favor of our green rights at the United Nations. While the resolutions and the general comments are not legally binding, they convey a symbolic message and pave the way towards the recognition of the right to a healthy environment in an international legally binding instrument. 

 

Progressively developed since the 1970s, the nature, scope and value of the right to a healthy environment have now been sufficiently affirmed to proclaim it in a universal and binding instrument.