Environmental rights are not yet being recognised as human rights

In 2022, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) agreed that a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is a human right. For decades, the right to a healthy environment has been ‘the missing human right’, implied by the right to life, the right to water and the right to food, but never recognised as a stand-alone right. Environmental rights are human rights, and the resolution has made companies’ obligation to respect environmental rights more explicit.

The food system that currently causes “trillions of dollars in environmental damages” must be transformed in order to respect, protect and fulfil human rights. While many companies provide jobs and implement social and environmental improvement projects, they have a foundational responsibility to respect human rights, including those of Indigenous People and Local Communities (IPLCS) who are dependent on the environment for their livelihoods, and are disproportionately affected by companies’ business operations.

Companies do not yet recognise environmental rights as human rights
Despite the overarching, rights-based framework provided by the right to a healthy environment, performance in the 2023 Nature Benchmark shows that overall, companies do not yet recognise environmental rights as human rights. Currently, less than 2% of the companies assessed explicitly commit to respecting local communities’ environmental rights. Similarly, only 12% of companies explicitly pledge to respect the right to access to water, sanitation, and hygiene, which is crucial to people’s well-being and dignity. In comparison, company performance is notably higher in the human rights topics covered in the Core Social Indicators. 196 companies (52%) publicly commit to respecting all internationally recognised human rights across their activities and 127 companies (33%) explicitly commit to respecting the rights of their workers under the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. The failure of companies to explicitly recognise environmental rights can partly be attributed to the fact that the UN only recently recognised them as a human right. However, companies must now act and embed it in their salient issues identification process.

A few companies are starting to acknowledge the right to a healthy environment and including it in their public policy commitments. UPM-Kymmene, a Finnish forest industry company discloses that its subsidiary companies must implement due diligence to identify, prevent, mitigate, and account for how they address their environmental impacts on human rights; and enable the remediation of any adverse human rights impacts they cause or contribute to through their impact on the environment.

Companies must protect and respect those defending the environment and human rights
The recognition of the right to a healthy environment should clarify the need for companies to protect and respect the rights to life, liberty, and security of human rights defenders working on environmental matters. This is an existing expectation as part of companies’ responsibility to respect human rights under the UNGPs and the OECD Guidelines, and was strengthened in the 2023 update to the latter. Attacks on human rights defenders take place in every region and relate to almost every business sector, but a high number of recorded attacks are linked to the food and agriculture industries. Therefore, this is an area that needs more attention across the food and agriculture sector: only 26 (7%) of the companies assessed commit to zero tolerance for acts of violence, threats, intimidation, or judicial harassment against human rights defenders.

There are, however, a small number of companies making commendable efforts in this area. Unilever – a British Personal & Household Products company – commits to address adverse impacts on human rights defenders across their own operations and their value chain in their 2023 Human Rights Policy Statement, and publicly support the recommendations of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders. The company has also published a Rainforest Action Network-endorsed set of Principles in Support of Human Rights Defenders, which includes a step-by-step guide on the implementation of their dedicated policy on protecting human rights defenders. To track company performance in this area, the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC) recently launched a Human Rights Defenders Policy Tracker, which enables users to find companies with policy commitments to support human rights defenders based on the assessments of WBA’s Corporate Human Rights Benchmark. A recent report by Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI) on shareholder engagement with Mexican food sector companies also cites a number of useful resources available on the protection of human rights defenders, including public investor letters and guidance on the role of financial institutions and companies.

The findings from the 2023 Nature Benchmark demonstrate that the majority of large food and agriculture and paper and forest companies do not explicitly incorporate environmental rights into their policies and practices and incorporate these concerns into their broader human rights due diligence.

Failing to proactively protect the environmental rights of local communities, including land and water rights, as well as the right to a healthy and safe environment, exposes businesses to potential legal, financial, and reputational liabilities. For instance, the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) will require companies to consider both environmental and human rights issues, which may help avoid separating these into different sets of responsibilities and contribute to understanding corporate responsibility more holistically. The CSDDD gives companies within its scope a clear legal mandate that they must address the human rights and environmental harms across their upstream and downstream supply chains.

Insights co-authored by Melis Ford, Hernando Echeverri and Ilayda Eren, in collaboration with the Nature Benchmark Team and the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment