Human Rights in the Process of National Adaptation Planning: Insights from a Review of Submitted NAPs

An area that has been missing in NAP planning is human rights, even though human rights are enshrined in the preamble of the Paris Agreement, which also underscores the needs of specific vulnerable groups and communities, such as women, children, and indigenous peoples as priority concerns. The Philippines Commission on Human Rights’ National Inquiry on Climate Change highlights the basic rights and duties of the parties to respect, fulfil and protect human rights in the context of climate change.

There is, therefore, a growing legal regime on the right to a healthy environment, and the climate change impacts on the fundamental rights of vulnerable groups and communities. This international legal regime includes the rights to life and health enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and reaffirmed in the succeeding generation of rights, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The impacts of climate change will infringe on the substantive rights of vulnerable groups, including the rights to life, to health and well-being, to physical integrity and human dignity, to an adequate standard of living, to a decent livelihood and to education. Thus, there is a need to assess to what extent existing NAPs have integrated the principles and approaches of human rights in their planning and implementation in order to understand the gaps and identify best practices.

This study reports on the outcomes of the mapping conducted on multisectoral NAPs available at the time of the analysis (2020-2021), especially those that are available in English, and discusses entry points to ensure that human rights principles are meaningfully integrated and guide the NAP process.