By Mathias Risse, Harvard University
The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
Heatwaves in Japan, Trump at the UN
I am just now finishing up a few days in Japan, which in so many ways is one of the most magnetic places in the world. At a very superficial level (or perhaps it is not even that superficial), to appreciate what humans can do together, there is nothing like spending some time at the wondrous Tokyo Train Station and taking it all in. A brief visit to a Japanese convenience store will have similar effects—though each time in the future you visit an American one, this will trigger painful associations in comparison. Each time I am in Japan I marvel at how they combine effectiveness and efficiency, humaneness and everyday aesthetics.
Why have I been here? For a number of years now, one of my themes at the Carr-Ryan Center has been to help ensure that human rights and ethics matter in how we bring new technologies, especially AI, into our societies. Under the overall umbrella of "AI safety" these matters received a good deal of attention around the world for some years. Unfortunately, the U.S. has now officially abandoned a safety approach to AI in favor of an “opportunity” approach, which I think has opened a new chapter in AI development (one that largely keeps human rights and ethics out — I've written about this in the context of the new American AI Action plan here).
This change in direction in the U.S. matters significantly because the U.S. commands 75% of global computing capacity. So now those of us based at American universities and committed to this nexus between human rights/ethics and technologies, to my mind, need to chip in where they can.
That, in essence, was what this event in Kyoto was about, or at any rate, that is how I saw my role there. Among other things, I got to moderate a panel that included the amazing Japanese roboticist Ishiguro Hiroshi of the University of Osaka (famous for building a robot of himself) and the immensely creative artist Hibino Katsuhiko, who also serves as president of the Tokyo University of the Arts. It was mostly people from Japanese academia, business, and engineering, but the organizers worked hard to create a genuinely global event to bring some leadership to these matters. To my mind there are few things that have ever mattered more to the future of humanity than to get the integration of AI into human lives right.
"Here in Japan, somewhere around 100,000 people had by then been hospitalized for symptoms of heatstroke… Probably not a single one of them would have thought such warnings were made by stupid people."
But that’s not what I mean here when talking about “the view from Japan.” Just in time for my arrival, as it happens, Japan snapped out of many weeks of overbearing heat that started as far back as June and lasted until September—much longer than is typical for Northeastern Asia. In late August, central Tokyo sweltered through nine consecutive days above 35 degrees Celsius (95 Fahrenheit). It would not cool down overnight. Risk of heatstroke was omnipresent, prompting people to drink copious amounts of water. This excessive consumption required many to take supplements to replace flushed-out nutrients—I brought along some of these myself.
Throughout these weeks, passengers arriving by air—including returning Japanese expats—would be warned to adjust to a climate they might not expect for Japan. Dozens and dozens of mostly elderly died. It would have been many more—especially in light of Japan’s dramatic aging—were it not for the magnificent Japanese infrastructure.
Heatwaves like this have long been understood as (rather obvious) consequences of climate change. They have come to stay. During this same period, Europe faced its worst wildfire season. Earlier this year, you will remember, large parts of Los Angeles burned down. There were massive floods in Texas. Wildfires in Canada with smoke going down to the U.S. have become quite normal too. And it will take very little memory (or search-engine) activity for you to recall many recent times that devastating fires, unusually large storms, lasting droughts, or strikingly powerful rainfall were in the news, around the world, across all continents.
All of that has come to stay. It is the reality of human-made climate change—on which, after decades of consensus building that had to overcome many sensible scientific objections, there is as of today no serious doubt any longer.
And then, on Tuesday, September 23, the President of the United States went to the United Nations in New York City on the occasion of General Assembly High-Level Week 2025. He told everyone that global warming was “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” He added that warnings of severe floods, widespread droughts, extreme heatwaves, and other climate-related disasters “were made up by stupid people.” The reactions in the audience on the footage of the event made clear how people in his audience felt about it.
Here in Japan, somewhere around 100,000 people had by then been hospitalized for symptoms of heatstroke, and many had to remain there for quite a while. Probably not a single one of them would have thought such warnings were made by stupid people. Thousands continued to be in treatment while Trump spoke at the UN.
In what follows, I briefly discuss common arguments for inaction on climate change (and counter them), examine how the human rights movement has increasingly taken environmental matters seriously, and highlight the importance of Indigenous insights in this domain—a theme that has become increasingly important in my own work. It is global mainstream culture that has brought us where we are—is it not time to listen to other voices?
Ways of Arguing that Nothing Much Should be Done about Climate Change
At this stage, there seem to be roughly three ways of arguing that little or nothing should be done about climate change.
One indeed is denial.
A second one is that the future will be better able to deal with climate change anyway, and perhaps we should not deprive them of the opportunity to display their ingenuity.
The third is that there is nothing morally troubling about the exercise of our allegedly “God-given” rights to help ourselves to what we need from nature—every generation should do it, all generations have done it, and they are not thereby wronging their offspring.
Here are some quick responses. Denial is not an intellectually feasible option at this stage—the scientific consensus has taken decades to build, and now the case is clear. But we must acknowledge that Trump follows historical trends. A couple of decades ago, Jared Diamond’s splendid book Collapse explored the causes for civilizational collapse over thousands of years. Sometimes it was remote cultures like medieval Viking colonies in Greenland that were abandoned. Sometimes it was civilizations like the Maya who were in proximity to other civilizations (and collapsed centuries before the Spanish arrival).
Why did this happen? Because of environment disconnect. Why did they not see it themselves? This is where Diamond makes his most interesting move: some of them probably did, but vested interests got in the way.
The great tragedy of environmental change after all is that it typically sneaks up on people slowly. It is never the most urgent thing for tomorrow, but dealing with it would take dramatic measures that easily undermine wealth and status of those in charge. And so, the powerful have little incentive to do much about it. Donald Trump has embodied this logic all along. What is still striking is that Trump embodies this logic even after most other powerful figures in the world—including Obama and Biden, the two American presidents who preceded him in office—had already come around to acknowledging the hard realities of climate change by paying attention to what was happening to their countries and to their people, not to mention the input of their scientists.
The future will be richer: Yes, but only in the aggregate. Today’s wealthy do not care terribly much for today’s poor. That is not likely to be different in the future. And it is the poor that will suffer most from climate change—poor countries, and poor people in wealthy countries. The wealthy can spend their time under air-conditioned domes and build them where they are least likely to get hit by floods and storms. It seems like a fair guess that future people would rather want to spend their ingenuity on things other than protecting themselves from flashfloods, heat strokes, and forest fires.
And as far as the God-given rights are concerned—and this theme seems to increasingly present on the American right: As far as I can tell, every religious tradition that has talked about such rights has also fully appreciated that humans come to this earth spread out over many, many generations. If today’s generation has God-given rights, future people have them too. And we can still safely assume that there will be future generations.
"The simple fact is that our industrial world is on fire, under water, covered by smoke, drying up, sweltering away under heatwaves, and blown apart by storms. All of that is happening because for centuries humans have lived on this planet in ways that are not sustainable."
People in the past had much more limited capacities to mess up the future of their offspring. If nothing else, those offspring could and would relocate. These days, anyone who believes in God-given rights must take seriously the thought that too extravagant a use of these rights will undermine them for future generations.
At this stage, the only way to avoid inflicting harm on the future—harm for which coming generations will likely decry the poverty and callousness of our decisions—is to take climate change seriously. God-given rights to take what we need must come with God-given duties to make sure future people will not be miserable because of our actions.
Human Rights and Climate Change
The human rights movement, for one, already does just that—take climate change seriously. Making a connection between human rights and the environment has been a major theme for the human rights movement in recent times. So this connection has not always been there. But one great thing about the human rights movement is that it is dynamic and recognizes concerns that were neglected in the past.
In July 2022, the UN General Assembly recognized a human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. The Human Rights Council had already done so in October 2021. Connections between the human rights framework and the climate crisis had become increasingly obvious over time. Millions are displaced annually by climate-related calamities. Roughly half the global population experiences severe water shortages for at least part of each year.
Climate change also greatly reduces food security. Heat- and pollution-related deaths are increasing and rising temperatures heighten risks of extinction and of collapse of ecosystems. Such issues most affect those already vulnerable. The current High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, has been especially good at drawing attention to these matters.
In 2005, Sheila Watt-Cloutier launched what appears to be the world's first international legal action linking human rights and climate change, a stepping-stone toward broader recognition of this link. Watt-Cloutier is an Inuk activist from Nunavik, Canada, the vast Arctic territory constituting Quebec's northern third. Watt-Cloutier submitted her 2005 petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights alongside 62 representatives from Inuit communities across Canada and Alaska. The petition argued that unchecked U.S. greenhouse gas emissions had violated Inuit cultural and environmental rights as guaranteed by the 1948 American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man.
The Arctic warms at twice the global rate, resulting in sea ice and permafrost melting. Climate change therefore poses an existential threat to Inuit culture. Their lifestyle depends on predictable sea ice patterns and cold weather. Through her work, Watt-Cloutier gained considerable visibility in global environmental circles. (For some recent reflections of mine on Alaska and Indigenous climate refugees in Alaska, see here. Alaska is the fastest warming US state, a matter largely ignored in the lower 48.)
In 2015 Watt-Cloutier published The Right to Be Cold. The book tells her story and makes her case for bringing the human rights framework to bear on environmental issues. The Inuit had eventually settled on referring to their blend of human rights language and environmental concerns as fighting for "the right to be cold." Behind this formulation lies advocacy for a stable and safe climate (an environmental concern) without which nobody can exercise any rights (a human rights concern). For the Inuit, a right to a stable climate just is a right to be cold. But given the global dimensions of their struggle, the Inuit's right to be cold amounts to whatever climate stability means elsewhere.
The Inter-American Commission ultimately declined to hear her petition. But they invited Watt-Cloutier to testify at their first hearing on climate change and human rights in March 2007. This struggle paved the way for other efforts to recognize climate change as a human rights issue.
The Right to a Clean, Healthy, and Sustainable Environment
In 2012, the Human Rights Council first appointed an independent expert with a mandate to study human rights obligations related to enjoying a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. The task was exploring how such obligations might best be deployed to improve environmental policies and inform policy making. Wake Forest University law professor John H. Knox was selected and remained in office until 2018 (designated Special Rapporteur for the second three-year period).
A major theme throughout Knox's tenure was that human rights and environment are interdependent.
A safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is necessary for full enjoyment of a broad range of human rights, including rights to life, health, food, water, and development. After all, human life as we know it unfolds as part of natural environment. Conversely, human rights, including rights to information, participation, and remedy, are vital to protecting the environment. There will always be special interests eager to exploit nature—which in turn violates the interests of many other people. But for these other people to be informed, organized, and able to act politically to defend the environment, they need human rights.
In January 2018, Knox submitted his final report. This document contains much of the intellectual substance behind the subsequent recognition of a right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment in the Human Rights Council and General Assembly. (The word "safe" evidently was dropped—perhaps safety covers too much.) This report looks back at Knox's six-year mandate and emphasizes that interdependence between human rights and environmental protection had long been explicitly or implicitly recognized in regional agreements, national constitutions, treaty bodies, regional tribunals, work of special rapporteurs across issues, and other international human rights bodies.
This occurred even though no such human right had been acknowledged globally. Instead, at these various levels, human rights law had been applied to environmental issues by "greening" existing rights, including those to life and health. Over time, this process created extensive human rights and environment jurisprudence. Accordingly, explicit recognition of a healthy environment right had been unnecessary to apply human rights norms to environmental issues.
Still, the vast majority of countries had recognized such a right at national or regional levels, creating an increasingly global reality. To strengthen and coalesce these efforts globally, Knox proposed to the Human Rights Council recognition of a human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.
The Connection to Indigenous Perspectives
Knox submitted "framework principles" as a way of understanding and implementing such a right. These sixteen principles are preceded by three preambular statements, the first being:
Human beings are part of nature, and our human rights are intertwined with the environment in which we live. Environmental harm interferes with the enjoyment of human rights, and the exercise of human rights helps to protect the environment and to promote sustainable development.
The second sentence captures the interdependence between human rights and environmental protection. The first sentence goes as far as possible within the human rights framework to approximate a common theme in Indigenous thought around the world: the embeddedness of human life into nature. That is, what matters most about human life is not that it stands apart from the rest of nature, but that we are embedded in nature and that therefore our human abilities give us a special responsibility for nature. It is our unwillingness to see the rest of nature as much more than resources available for our extraction that has created our current environmental disaster to begin with. It therefore behooves us to pay attention to the insights of people whose thought and practice have stayed clear of causing such calamities all along.
It is by itself quite remarkable that it even makes sense to speak of indigeneity in a global context, and to notice that a common theme across Indigenous cultures on all continents is embeddedness in nature. This speaks volumes about the deep roots of human wisdom in the original period of the spread of humankind around this planet. There is much to reconnect to here even without abandoning many of the great technological achievements of recent centuries.
In that spirit, for instance, on the occasion of the Harvard Climate Action Week 2025, the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights recently convened a panel titled Indigenous Leadership in Protecting Water as a Fundamental Right. The discussion, which I moderated, brought together three inspiring Indigenous leaders: Bryan BainBridge, CEO of the Great Lakes Intertribal Council Inc.; Charitie Ropati, water engineer and climate adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General; and Dr. Kelsey Leonard, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of the Environment at the University of Waterloo. Together, they explored how Indigenous knowledge, law, and lived practice shape the fight for water security in an era of climate disruption.
In addition to the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment mentioned above, there is also a human right to safe drinking water, recognized by the UN in 2010. Yet the human rights framework treats the environment as something external to humanity, existing for human use. Indigenous perspectives challenge this division by counting water among our relations, among the greater nature into which we are all embedded. They see water as part of the overall system of life that sustains us all.
Throughout the event, a recurring theme was the need to reframe the human relationship with water—not as a resource for human consumption but as a living relative with which humans share reciprocal duties. From BainBridge’s Great Lakes fisheries to Ropati’s relocated Alaskan village, to Leonard’s global movement for the rights of nature, each story underscored that Indigenous leadership offers not only strategies for survival but also pathways toward justice, dignity, and regeneration.
One commentary that surfaced in response insisted that our event “pushed” unscientific nature-rights mysticism at Harvard. “Rivers are not alive. Waters are not our ‘living relatives.’ They are geological features.” Rivers of course are geological features. But that is neither here nor there. For many of us seeing rivers as kin will not be a serious intellectual option. What is much easier to see, however, is that those who see the world this way make striking contributions to preserving nature from which we all benefit. What is also much easier to see is that, say, the Christian tradition describes everything around us as divine creation—and contains traditions, such as those of St. Francis, that interpret all of this in terms of human obligation to take care of things. (I’ve argued that we should see our current pope in this tradition.) There are many ways of seeing rivers as more than geological features.
The commentary concludes: “It’s a simple fact that indigenous practices toward nature are inadequate in an industrial world.”
That statement should give us pause.
But no. The simple fact is that our industrial world is on fire, under water, covered by smoke, drying up, sweltering away under heatwaves, and blown apart by storms. All of that is happening because for centuries humans have lived on this planet in ways that are not sustainable.
To return once more to the view from Japan: both Japanese Shintoism and Buddhism have deep resources to help us come to a new appreciation of nature and our embeddedness in it. As does the human rights movement. And it follows from what I argued above that any sensible conservatism these days should also be understood in terms of not leaving behind a planet that becomes increasingly less inhabitable by humans like us. How much more environmental calamity does it take specifically for the United States of America to rejoin the efforts to combat climate change?
The time has come for the United States and, indeed, the global community to embrace once and for all the fusion of human rights and environmental stewardship—before we lose the chance.
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