That warning was made explicit earlier this year in Geneva, where Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, posed a blunt question to governments: are current policies sufficient to protect people from escalating climate disruption and safeguard their futures?
His conclusion was unequivocal. Global efforts, he said, fall far short of what is needed.
Climate harm as a rights violation
According to Joyeeta Gupta, climate impacts must be understood not just as an environmental emergency, but as violations of human rights.
Gupta, who co-chairs the international scientific advisory body Earth Commission and serves as a UN high-level representative on science, technology and innovation, argues that international climate policy has long failed to quantify human harm.
She points out that the original 1992 climate convention made no attempt to assess impacts on people. Even when governments agreed to limit global warming under the Paris Agreement in 2015, the chosen thresholds reflected political compromise rather than human safety.
For small island states, she said, even the 2°C target represented an existential risk. Rising seas, saltwater intrusion and intensifying storms threaten the survival of entire nations. Scientific assessments later confirmed that 1.5°C would significantly reduce harm compared with 2°C — but would still carry severe consequences.
In research published in Nature, Gupta argues that a rise beyond 1°C already breaches a "just boundary," exposing more than one per cent of the global population — around 100 million people — to rights violations linked to climate impacts.
That boundary was crossed in 2017. Current trajectories suggest the world is likely to exceed 1.5°C within the next decade.
Promises that temperatures can be lowered later in the century, she warns, ignore irreversible damage. Melting glaciers, collapsing ecosystems and loss of life cannot be undone.
Inequality becomes injustice
Climate justice, Gupta argues, is inseparable from development. Basic human rights — including food, clean water, housing, transport and electricity — all depend on energy use.
The idea that global development goals can be achieved without changes to consumption in wealthy societies does not hold up, she said, either mathematically or ethically.
Her research shows that meeting essential needs carries an emissions footprint. Because planetary limits have already been breached, high-income countries must cut emissions far more rapidly — not only to stabilise the climate, but to create space for poorer communities to realise their rights.
Failing to do so, she said, turns inequality into injustice.
Climate change and displacement
Displacement is one of the clearest manifestations of climate injustice, yet international law still does not recognise people displaced by climate impacts as refugees.
Gupta describes a familiar progression. Climate stress initially forces adaptation, such as switching crops or changing livelihoods. When adaptation fails, communities absorb losses — land, income, safety. When survival itself becomes impossible, people are forced to move.
Most climate displacement today occurs within countries or regions rather than across borders. Migration is costly, dangerous and often involuntary.
A central legal challenge is causation: determining whether displacement is driven primarily by climate change or by other factors such as governance failures or economic pressures.
Here, attribution science is becoming increasingly important. New methods allow researchers to link long-term climate change to specific shifts in rainfall, heat extremes, health outcomes and disasters. As this science advances, Gupta believes climate displacement could eventually be incorporated into international refugee law.
A fragmented legal system
Addressing climate harm through human rights law has proven difficult due to the fragmented nature of international legal frameworks.
Environmental treaties, human rights conventions, trade agreements and investment rules often operate independently. This allows governments to compartmentalise responsibility — committing to climate goals in one forum while prioritising investor protections or trade interests elsewhere.
As a result, climate damage has traditionally been discussed in technical terms — emissions pathways, temperature targets, carbon budgets — without asking how these outcomes affect people's lives.
That approach is beginning to shift.
Courts begin to connect climate and rights
In a landmark advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice clarified that climate obligations cannot be separated from human rights and environmental law.
Governments and courts, the opinion stated, must consider climate change alongside existing human rights duties. Continued fossil fuel use, it added, may amount to an internationally wrongful act.
For Gupta, the significance is profound. The ruling signals that states are responsible not only for their own emissions, but also for regulating companies operating within their jurisdiction.
Responsibility across borders
Assigning responsibility for climate harm remains complex because impacts do not respect national boundaries.
Gupta points to cases in which individuals affected by climate change have sought accountability in foreign courts. While judges have increasingly accepted that such claims are admissible, proving the direct link between emissions and specific harms remains difficult.
Attribution science is again reshaping the landscape, making it easier to connect emissions to damage. Legal strategies are evolving accordingly — from lawsuits over corporate misrepresentation to national laws requiring companies to monitor environmental harm throughout their supply chains.
Climate stability as a shared right
Rather than framing climate as an individual entitlement, Gupta argues for recognising climate stability as a collective human right.
Stable climate conditions underpin agriculture, water systems, infrastructure and social order. Without them, societies cannot function.
Courts are increasingly acknowledging that climate instability undermines existing rights, even where climate itself is not explicitly codified as one.
This thinking is now reflected at the highest levels of global governance.
Political will and the path ahead
Addressing climate injustice ultimately comes down to power and political choice. Repeated withdrawals from international agreements and continued fossil fuel expansion by wealthy countries have weakened global trust.
Gupta argues that market-driven approaches alone cannot resolve a collective crisis. Climate change, she said, is a public goods problem that requires strong institutions, cooperation and regulation.
Developing countries face an impossible dilemma: wait for promised climate finance while damages escalate, or act independently and pursue justice later. Delay, she warns, carries existential risks.
As the UN's human rights chief concluded in Geneva, climate action must be rooted in equity.
If societies fail to protect lives, livelihoods and futures, he warned, they risk entrenching the very injustices they claim to oppose.