Climate Change Adaptation: Impacts on Human Rights in the Mediterranean Region

10 March 2026. From 18:30 | Conference | English | IEMed

In recent years, the effects of anthropogenic climate change have become increasingly visible. Recent heat waves, droughts, and floods across the Mediterranean are a painful testament to its human and natural costs. In response, the first quarter of this century saw the development of different international legal and political efforts to alleviate the effects of climate change. Central to these efforts are the 2015 Paris Agreement and annual negotiations of the so-called ‘Conference of the Parties’ (COP) that form the centre of international climate governance.

Climate change has increasingly been brought before international, regional and domestic human rights forums. Through strategic litigation and advocacy, actors use these human rights frameworks to add more pressure to governments. What this does is to reframe climate inaction as a duty-bearing failure, rather than a negotiation shortfall. With a focus on the Mediterranean Region, we will dive deeper into this ‘turn to human rights’ of climate governance. We will discuss some of its practical effects and, as the effects of climate change are increasingly visible, what we can expect going forward.

A lecture by Michiel Hoornick, researcher in International Law, Geneva Graduate Institute.

Michiel Hoornick is a current PhD candidate in International Law at the Graduate Institute on International and Development Studies in Geneva (IHEID). Previously, he worked as a researcher at the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies in Belgium and as a programme officer at the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion. He also builds on previous experiences at the UNHCR headquarters in Geneva and the Netherlands Permanent Mission to the UN in New York. Michiel holds Master degrees in International and European Law from Tilburg University (the Netherlands) and IHEID (Switzerland).

His most prominent works are: The Human Rights Council Failure to Protect Uyghurs in China – for Now (OpenGlobalRights, 2022); The Statelessness-Trafficking Nexus. A Case Study in Thailand (The Newsletter 87, 2020); and Case-Study on the UN Development Policy (Horizon, 2020).

A session co-organised with the Master’s Degree in Lifelong Learning in Sustainability. Environment, Society, and Economy CEI/UB within the framework of the Aula Mediterrània lecture series and moderated by Didac Amat Puigsech, PhD in International Climate Law and Lecturer of the Master’s Degree.