Understanding Environmental Destruction as a Human Rights Violation

Abstract

Abstract The environment is very important for the integrity of human personhood because humans are living beings in the world. Pope Francis refers to the world as our common home since it hosts human beings and other creatures. However, despite its importance to human life, the environment undergoes constant destruction through various human activities; and environmental degradation has implications that cut across individual human and collective rights. The right to life which allows humans to exercise other rights is under attack since life is supported by the environment as it provides life’s necessities including food, water and fresh air. Since efforts to seek concrete solutions to the environmental challenges have proven ineffective, the approach here combines the normative pursuit of moral justifications for claiming certain goods as fundamental human rights with the practical pursuit of procedural and institutional mechanisms to yield realisable solutions.