Every year, environmental crises affect millions of people around the world causing sickness and decimating lives and livelihoods.

When environmental degradation garners international attention its impact is often framed in terms of harm to nature. But another, often overlooked, way to understand a toxic spill or a mining disaster is in terms of its impact on human rights—not least the right to life, to health, and to safe food and water.

In 2011, in Henan province, eastern China, for example, rivers ran blood-red from pollution, and thick smoke choked the air around the lead smelters and battery factories that power the local economy—a deeply worrying situation in terms of environmental pollution. But as the Human Rights Watch 2011 report My Children Have Been Poisoned showed, Henan's health and environmental crisis has also led to human rights violations that have robbed citizens of a host of internationally recognized rights—such as those to health and to protest peacefully—and have jeopardized the physical and intellectual development of thousands of children.

Unfortunately, in practice, governments and international agencies do not often enough analyze environmental issues through the prism of human rights or address them together in laws or institutions. But they should, and they should do so without fear that doing so will compromise efforts to achieve sustainability and environmental protection.

Indeed, rather than undermine these important goals, a human rights perspective brings an important and complementary principle to the fore— namely that governments must be accountable for their actions. And it provides advocacy tools for those affected by environmental degradation to carve out space to be heard, meaningfully participate in public debate on environmental problems, and where necessary, use independent courts to achieve accountability and redress. As the old legal maxim goes, there can be no right without a remedy.

Regional human rights instruments—such as the Additional Protocol to the American Convention on Human Rights in the Area of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and its Additional Protocol on the Rights of Women—recognize a right to a healthy environment (or a “general satisfactory” environment in the case of the African Charter, adopted in 1981).