Giving Future Generations a Voice on Climate Change

Doug Struck’s recent Christian Science Monitor article on carbon offsets provides yet another illustration of the limited potential of market-based proposals for addressing climate change. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but apparently a complex, unregulated market is ripe for fraud, deceit, and incompetence. While it’s important to note that there are several legitimate carbon offset programs, the field is predictably littered with unsavory financial speculators posing as environmentalists.

Hopefully we’ve learned by now that market-based solutions to society’s problems offer, at best, an incomplete approach. The comprehensive remediation of climate change will also require innovative mechanisms that directly address its human implications. In this vein, the rights of future generations provide an intriguing approach for the protection of human rights in an environmental context.

Since the 1970s, intergenerational rights have been recognized by several international agreements, including the Stockholm Declaration, the Rio Declaration, and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The rights of future generations are further protected by multiple national constitutions. In the United States, there are overtures to intergenerational justice in both state and federal law. But how does a society actually protect the rights of future generations?

Various jurisdictions are exploring the protection of intergenerational rights through the establishment of government advocates. In 2008, Hungary appointed its first Parliamentary Commissioner for Future Generations. The office is tasked with protecting the environmental interests of future generations by acting as an environmental ombudsman. In pursuance of this mandate, the Commissioner can receive constitutional complaints, engage in parliamentary advocacy, conduct research on relevant topics, or intercede where development projects may cause irreversible environmental harm.

The Hungarian approach has garnered attention in the U.K., where the British Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Miliband, more generally recognized the need to institutionalize the rights of future generations in November. Additionally, the government’s independent advisory body on sustainable development, the Sustainable Development Commission, has gone further by proposing a legislative Congress for the Future.

Overall, the strengthening of the rights of future generations will go a long way in framing climate change as more than a scientific, developmental, or economic issue. Of course, it’s always important to keep such things in context. Although Hungary has been proactive in its creation of a Parliamentary Commissioner for Future Generations, it also featured prominently in Struck’s exposé. Recognizing intergenerational rights are only part of the solution. Moreover, it’s hard to believe that this will provide some sort of magic bullet. It’s not as if the human rights of current generations receive adequate universal recognition from courts, transnational corporations, or government actors. Finally, intergenerational justice is a malleable concept — there is no guarantee that progressive activists will hold a monopoly over its interpretation. Nonetheless, I remain cautiously optimistic that by further humanizing climate change, intergenerational rights will continuously remind us that it will take more than money to make our troubles go away.

Photo credit: Mtk87