The right to a clean and healthy environment is a human right that belongs to everyone and is now protected by the United Nations. A clean and healthy environment is not only a necessity for all people to flourish, but also for the enjoyment of other protected human rights including the right to health, sanitation, food, water, and development.
In 2022, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution officially recognizing the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment as a human right. This resolution was co-sponsored by over 100 member countries and passed with a vote of 161 states in favor and 0 against, and only 8 abstaining. The passage of the resolution was motivated in part by the climate crisis, which has led to biodiversity, nature loss, and contamination of natural resources worldwide. It was also the result of widespread activism by youth climate activists from around the world, including Xiye Bastida, Vanessa Nakate, and Jamie Margolin, who highlight the link between climate justice, racial justice, and indigenous rights and advocate for a diverse set of voices in climate related decision-making. They also focus their intervention on collective decision-making rather than individual behavior.
Too often, conversations around climate crisis mitigation focus on individual responsibility to protect the environment through reuse and recycling. While these individual actions are important, they are not solutions. Governments have the primary responsibility to respect, protect, and fulfill this right. Corporations also have mandated responsibilities to respect international human rights standards.
What we can do is advocate for the full protection of this right for ourselves and our communities.
Below, you can check out case studies of human rights defenders protecting this right.
Case Studies
Hennepin County Energy Recovery Center (HERC), Minneapolis, Minnesota
The Hennepin County Energy Recovery Center (HERC) is a trash incinerator located in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota in Hennepin County near Target Field, the Twin Cities’ Major League Baseball stadium. The facility operates as a waste-to-energy plant. It was developed after a 1980 state law that prioritized incinerating garbage due to fears about overflowing landfills. The HERC burns trash to produce electricity and steam, which then is utilized for one of the state's major public utility providers, Xcel Energy.
The HERC’s production of electricity and steam results in a variety of health-adverse air pollutants including carbon dioxides, particulate matter, lead, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide, which can significantly impact child development along with brain and cardiac health. The HERC is responsible for 25% of nitrogen oxide emissions in Hennepin County associated with stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, and other chronic respiratory diseases.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s CO-Benefits Risk Assessment Health Impacts and Mapping Tool estimated that the HERC’s 2019 emissions resulted in a minimum of $11 - 24 million per year in negative health impacts and costs for residents including increased hospital visits, costly medications, and decreased abilities to work, and lower life expectancies.
Since 2009, the HERC has been a site of controversy, with environmental justice advocates pushing for its complete closure, while both private interest groups and city officials have pressed to expand its waste capacity to be able to burn more garbage. In 2009 and 2013, Hennepin County failed to get approval from the Minneapolis Planning Commission for burning more garbage. In 2021, Hennepin County designed a Climate Action Plan that did not include the closure of the HERC. In the 2023 state legislative session, the state instated a mandate for 100% clean energy by 2040. Waste incineration is not considered clean energy. The Hennepin County Board has voted to close the facility at some point between 2028 and 2040, with climate activists pushing for closure sooner.
The HERC’s mass amounts of pollution production creates severe health consequences for residents in the area. This is inconsistent with government responsibility to ensure the Right to a Clean and Healthy Environment. Notably, the neighborhood surrounding the HERC is occupied primarily by low-income residents of color. Meaning, the adverse health effects created by the HERC are disproportionately concentrated in a marginalized community. Human rights require equality and non-discrimination, meaning the right to a clean and healthy environment is one that must be afforded to all communities. By specifically impacting a community already facing systemic disadvantages, the HERC is at odds with these tenets.
La Oroya, Peru
La Oroya, Peru is a city on the River Mantaro and the capital of the country’s Yauli Province. The city is located on the Eastern watershed of the Andes Mountain Range, and has approximately 30,000 residents. The town was first established in the 16th century by Spanish settlers as a mining site because of valuable metals in the area. In 1922, an American mining company established a smelter, a large-scale industrial plant that extracts pure metals from ore, in the town. This plant is still the town’s biggest employer. The plant later became nationalized and under control of a Peruvian state-owned corporation in 1974. In 1997, the plant was purchased by the company Doe Run Peru, a subsidiary of the American company Doe Run. The plant is privately owned.
The heavy metal mining and processing done by the plant creates mass amounts of toxic industrial pollutants, particularly lead, copper, zinc and sulfur dioxide. In 2007, La Oroya was named one of TIME Magazine’s Most Polluted Places. In 2007, 99% of children in the town had blood levels beyond acceptable World Health Organization (WHO) limits. In 1999, the average lead level in blood was triple the amount of the WHO limit. High amounts of lead levels in blood can lead to irreversible organ damage, especially for children. Lead will continue to remain in the city’s soil for centuries, meaning that even if the plan were to completely shut down production now, effects would still be felt for generations.
Earthjustice is a global environmental law organization whose mission is to protect people’s health and combat climate change. In 2006, the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense and Earthjustice, put forth a petition on behalf of families and environmental defenders in the region which turned into the filing of an international case against the government of Peru, for failing to protect the health of citizens in the region. In 2021, after 15 years of advocacy from the initial filing, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights officially established the Peruvian government’s responsibility in the case and referred it to the Inter-American Court. The Inter-American Court first heard the case in a public hearing in 2022, 18 years after the initial petition.
In 2024, over 100 years after the smelter was first built, the Inter-American Court established the government of Peru’s responsibility in the violation of the rights to a healthy environment of the 80 defendants including violation of the rights of 57 children, and for the violation of the right to life of two victims who had passed due to health complications. In the judgement, the court ordered the State of Peru to enact reparation measures for the population of La Oroya.
The court also ruled that the state did not comply with its obligations of “active transparency” and access to information regarding the site, along with ensuring the right to access to political participation regarding environmental decisions, both procedural components of the right to a clean and healthy environment.
This ruling was a landmark development in protecting the human right to a clean and healthy environment and set forth an important legal precedent for state obligations in pollution control and environmental protection across the Americas.
Stop Line 3, Minnesota
Line 3 is an oil pipeline that runs through Minnesota, run by the Canadian energy company Enbridge, and is also the source of one of the largest inland oil spills in American history. In 1999, Line 3 ruptured near Grand Rapids, Minnesota, resulting in nearly 1.7 million gallons of crude oil spilled along a Mississippi tributary river.
In the 2010s, Enbridge began to make plans to replace the pipeline with a new one and expand its capacity, which prompted some Minnesotans to object in support of environmental rights.The new route was twice the capacity as the previous pipeline and crosses 200 bodies of water throughout the state of Minnesota. Additionally, the old pipeline remained buried underground. The route of the pipeline also crosses directly through Indigenous Anishnaabe lands, threatening tribal sovereignty and the natural resources indigenous communities subsist on, including areas of wild rice growth, lakes, and the Mississippi River.
Line 3 specifically contains tar sands oil, which releases three times the amount of greenhouse gas pollution, compared to crude oil production. The pipeline is environmentally detrimental to air, water, and land resources making it inconsistent with the right to a clean and healthy environment.
In response, indigenous communities, including the group Honor the Earth, and later joined by climate activists, began protesting this pipeline with continuous demonstrations since the pipeline proposal in 2015. Indigenous protestors and organizers of this movement refer to themselves as water protectors. The movement, known as the ‘Stop Line 3’ campaign, gained national attention for their civil disobedience and direct action tactics.
Despite the resistance movement, the pipeline became operational in 2021. Still many are concerned with both the environmental implications and the violation of indigenous treaty rights. Along with other key pipeline protests, this movement elevated indigenous sovereignty and environmental justice causes in the national consciousness.