How do Human Rights and Rights of Nature intersect?

What is it about?

Do the poor pollute? It seems that most academics understand how the lack of infrastructure (and the fact that all humans consume...and thus produce waste) causes the poor to pollute. But few empirical studies exist on this subject. This paper conducts a riparian-scale analyses of water quality along open-access stormwater drains with a succession of different land uses-- 'informal' settlements, and 'formal' residential or industrial or commercial or transit--to show that pollution predominantly occurs upstream of these settlements, with specific 'formal' land uses upstream of the settlements impacting specific water quality parameters.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Realizing that pollution predominantly occurs upstream of 'informal' settlements, lends settlement residents environmental agency in an emerging Conflict of Rights scenario. Wherein, the juridical construction of India’s Right to Life has recognized right to water and sanitation in ‘informal’ settlements but not right to clean environments, the latter instead applied to label them as polluters. And now, the (understandable) expansion of the judicial toolkit for resource/environment protection via Rights of Nature has resulted in an additional pressure on informal settlements that are forced into living in ecologically sensitive or vulnerable areas, like stormwater drains emptying into one of the world's most polluted rivers!