A vast literature on the legislative alignment between environmental and human rights concerns has flourished since the 1960s. This literature has mostly been occupied with the negative impacts that environmental harms and pollution have on human rights. The scholarly engagement with environmental and human rights protection gave rise to new fields of literature commonly referred to as ‘human rights approaches to environmental protection’ or ‘environmental human rights law’, thereby instantiating the normative quasi subsumption of environmental and human rights protection. This contributed to advancing both the agenda of environmental and human rights protection as well as their ever-closer intertwinement, and reinforced the mainstream anthropocentric and synergistic framing of their relationship. Yet, these two characteristics have also been contested. While much ink has been spilled on critiquing the lingering anthropocentrism that underpins a human rights law-based approach to environmental protection, less attention has been paid to the problematic emphasis on synergies that take the mutually beneficial linkages between environmental and human rights protection for granted. The analysis maps these different strands of inquiry and critique against human exceptionalism and the ideal of frictionless compatibility between environmental protection and human rights, and identifies how the book contributes to these debates.

The chapter introduces some key terms used throughout the book before offering an outline of the overall argument in favour of the environmental minimum: it is intended to serve both as a primer and a convenient reference point for the following chapters. The core contribution of the environmental minimum is that it translates general and abstract committments to human rights and environmental protection into specific and practical measures to protect the environment. The normative argument for the environmental minimum framework centres on its consistency and compatibility with the normative claims of environmental human rights, and its alignment with fundamental legal principles. What renders the environmental minimum preferable to other conceivable incarnations of environmental human rights is its practical and incremental approach. Crucially, the framework only becomes operational if rightsholders succeed in establishing a specific risk to a human right under an existing protection regime. Thus, the environmental minimum is in principle compatible with the doctrinal position adopted under the examined international and domestic protection regimes, most notably the ECHR.

The chapter argues that a commitment to human rights necessarily entails basic environmental protection duties as a matter of political morality. This is because egregious forms of environmental harm critically undermine the fundamental values that underpin human rights, chiefly human dignity and autonomy. Human rights must therefore contain a sub-category of protections which we can conceptualise as environmental human rights. The human interests that environmental human rights protect are the environmental conditions necessary for the preservation and flourishing of human life, namely clean water, food, air, and soil within a functioning ecosystem that includes diverse species of plants and wildlife. Those who challenge these rights as vague overlook the significant room for agreement in the pursuit of a comprehensive and universal notion of a ‘sound’ environment. Meanwhile, converns over potential conflicts with other rights are overstated, because balancing of competing interests is a pervasive and well-established feature of human rights law and contemporary environmental regulations are already being challenged on the basis of competing rights, for instance to property.

The chapter introduces and defends the environmental minimum as a framework for the protections (and correlative duties) that environmental human rights require. It develops the guiding principles of the framework, modelled on the characteristics of human rights identified by James Nickel and as specified through the lens of environmental protection following Joseph Raz's interest theory of rights. The core prinicples of the environmental minimum that allow courts to make sense of environmental harm in the context of human rights protection regimes are: the specific risk principle, which acts as the trigger for the environmental minimum, requiring a specific risk to a recognised right arising from environmental harm; the minimum standards, which specify the baseline standard of review that courts ought to employ and are based on domestic and international legal norms, as well as established and emerging evidence that is generally accepted in the relevant scientific community; and finally the high priority characteristic, which guides the balancing of environmental protection with competing interests based on human rights.