Climate Crises, Gendered Impacts, and Legal Responses: A Feminist Examination of International Human Rights Law Reform

This research project explores whether reforming international human rights law can effectively address the gender-related impact of climate change. It responds to the significant threat that climate change presents to citizens' livelihoods, security, and health worldwide. These adverse impacts contribute to claims that climate change will violate human rights, including but not limited to the right to non-discrimination, the right to live free from gender-based violence, and the right to an adequate standard of living.

Given this, international human rights law is often referenced as a mechanism that can address the rights violations that result from climate change. Yet the legal challenges are multiple, and a prominent concern is whether international human rights law can effectively address the social justice issues that arise from disproportionate climate impact, particularly given the disparities across the Global North and South.

This intervention focuses on the gender-related impact of climate change, which is intimately connected to and constituted by these other facets of social location, including race, nation, and availability of adaptive resources. Interdisciplinary research across gender studies, geography, and political theory demonstrates that climate change will disproportionately impact women, girls, as well as sexual and gender minorities.

For instance, climate precarity will aggravate gender based sexual violence, increase discrimination, and heighten mortality among women in natural disasters. Since international human rights law seldom conceptualises the connection between climate change and increased gender inequality, scholars have proposed law reform as a solution. Yet, current research has not adequately evaluated the capacity of law reform to effectively address the material and gendered harm caused by climate change.

This research thus responds to gaps in existing literature that propose law reform as a solution for climate injustice without adequately interrogating its effectiveness in this context, centring the perspectives of those most affected, or examining gender beyond a stable identity category. The proposed research is an interdisciplinary project at the intersection of gender studies, law, and climate change.

It contributes to these fields alongside broader research on environmental justice that problematises the omission of marginalised perspectives. It could also contribute to policy and legislative efforts outside of the academy by seeking effective and inclusive approaches to climate adaptation. The project gestures towards a more inclusive and gender-transformative approach to evaluating the effectiveness of international human rights law reform, which can produce more relevant responses to an urgent and complex issue.

Most qualitative research will be conducted by utilising online communication technologies, however, there may be some travel required in order to conduct fieldwork with participants in the proposed case studies, likely in Switzerland and Pakistan.