The United Nations has made significant progress since the Stockholm Conference of 1972 in putting the environment on the global agenda. Indeed, the environment plays a major role in two of the largest UN initiatives today: the Paris climate accord and the Sustainable Development Goals. But in a new brief for the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Foundation, Wilson Center Fellow Ken Conca writes that the traditional approach to environmental issues is running up against its limits.

United Nations efforts to date have relied chiefly on the regulatory capabilities of individual nations and occasional transnational cooperation. The rights of the individual – the human right to a healthy, clean, safe environment – have been largely ignored as a rationale for action.

Bringing rights to the fore could help solve several critical modern environmental challenges, Conca writes. These include closing the regulatory gaps created by globalization; improving accountability for “distant, invisible, and unrecognized” environmental damage; better protecting environmental champions, who are facing increasing levels of violence; and building political momentum for climate action, which is crucial given the voluntary nature of the Paris accord.

Writes Conca:

As important as what rights can do is how they do it. International rights-based approaches can strengthen rights in the domestic sphere, either through the diffusion of new standards or by providing a channel for citizens to take advantage of legal tools and rights claims they may not realize are available to them. Rights-based approaches also create normative force, through naming and shaming campaigns. They can also bend the standard operating procedures of administrative systems toward more open reporting and information sharing and encourage the modeling of better practices for consultation, participation and dialogue. Perhaps most importantly, recognition of rights – and personal protections for the people who use them – can create a space in which to manage the very real conflicts that are inevitable around resource extraction and pollution, through dialogue, negotiation and the informed consent of affected communities. Indeed, such dialogue can be more than simply conflict management, but rather a way to tap positive synergies among sustainable resource use, confidence-building, and social legitimacy.”

Download the full brief from the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Foundation for more.