Climate Change, Human Rights, and Technology Transfer: Normative Challenges and Technical Opportunities

Abstract

This chapter reviews the broad strategy to link human rights and climate change, focusing specifically on how well the strategy works to strengthen obligations on developed countries to transfer technology that can reduce or mitigate the effects of increased carbon emissions. The chapter posits that the state-centered “development” approach that has dominated both economic development and climate discourse to date has failed to provide a sufficient foundation for realistically addressing the issue of technology transfer. This chapter argues that the human rights approach solves two key problems that the development framework does not. First, it enables differentiation to take place, not between states, but between more vulnerable and less vulnerable populations within countries. It thus enables a focus on the most vulnerable populations, and in doing so also provides a basis for limiting the scope and nature of the demand for technologies to address climate change. Second, by limiting the scope of needed technologies, a human rights approach makes it more likely that such technologies will be made available to populations in need. If they are not, and lower-resource governments must act to secure climate change mitigation technologies for their citizens, the human rights approach will limit the grounds upon which actors in developed countries can challenge these decisions.