New publication: Challenging anthropocentrism in human rights - Children's relational approach to the right to a healthy environment

30 Sep 2026

A journal article entitled Challenging anthropocentrism in human rights: Children’s relational approach to the right to a healthy environment, written by our doctoral researcher Emily Murray was published earlier this month in the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment. This article is available open access and can be downloaded here.

This piece of work is a core component of Emily’s doctoral thesis, which aims to apply a relational framework for a deeper understanding of children’s environmental rights and climate actions. As we have been researching in the Youth Climate Justice project, children and youth around the world are partaking in grassroots climate actions and this has important implications for how we understand children’s rights and international human rights more broadly.  For Emily’s research, she is interested in the ways in which children and young people’s relationships with nature influence how their environmental rights are understood and enacted, and what this looks like in action.

To begin, the article points out that human rights law has traditionally treated humans as separate from nature. As human rights are increasingly engaged in an environmental context, particularly through the right to a healthy environment, it has been acknowledged by many scholars that it is necessary to question this separation as it risks reinforcing the same thinking that contributed to the climate crisis in the first place. To challenge this separation and reimagine our relationships with the natural world, there has been a ‘relational turn’ across many disciplines which emphasise values such as interdependence, reciprocity and co-existence between humans and the more-than-human world. Relational thinking is inherent to Indigenous and non-Western cultures around the world and offer a different, more holistic perspective on environmental protection. As the world faces increasingly interconnected social and ecological problems, many activists and scholars are turning towards such relational approaches to rethink how humans live with and within nature.

The main argument this article puts forth is that children and young people are a part of this ‘relational’ shift which is evident through their actions in the court. First, the article builds this argument by drawing on research from children’s geographies and environmental psychology to show that children’s ways of knowing are often embodied and relational. Because of this, children can face a type of epistemic injustice called ‘testimonial injustice’ where they are not considered adequate ‘knowers’ and receive less credit for what they know because of their age. However, children are challenging these dominant adult-centric and often Western structures by asserting their knowledge and experience through legal processes.

By exploring the court statements from child/youth-involved climate cases (using the YCJ database), this article underscores how children/youth often describe their experiences of climate harm through relationships. Young plaintiffs often share their emotional connections to the natural world and demonstrate the interdependence between humans and nature, for example, through showing direct links between human and environmental health. Placed-based connection is also important to young plaintiff’s climate narratives, as well as the way nature fosters the flourishing of relationships with family and friends. This relational framing stresses responsibility towards nature not as an individual entitlement but as part of what it means to be human and a rights-holder. Traditional conceptualisations of children and the human rights framework are challenged through the actions of young climate advocates, which signals a ‘postpaternalist’ era for children’s rights.  

We invite you to read the open-access version of this article found on UCC’s Open Access institutional repository here and to share it widely with colleagues and communities committed to the intersection of relationality, children’s rights and climate action.