My Book Chapter on Climate Change, Human Rights, and Technology Transfer in New Technologies for Human Rights Law and Practice edited by Molly Land and Jay Aronson in now available Open Access! The whole book is available Open Access as well, with great contributions by many authors. The book is a unique contribution that defines a new intersection of human rights and technology.
My 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. I argue 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.
The 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.
Technology, Sustainability & Human Rights 