Climate Exit: Infrastructural Secession, the Shared-Vulnerability Premise, and the Future of Climate-Era Human Rights Obligations

Abstract

Climate era human rights obligation depends on a mechanism it has never had to defend: that the persons capable of influencing environmental policy remain exposed to the harms that policy addresses. This article names that mechanism the shared vulnerability premise and asks whether it can survive a documented trajectory in which private wealth increasingly purchases durable infrastructural independence from shared environmental risk. Using a stipulated scenario of complete infrastructural self-sufficiency as an analytical device, the article reconstructs the doctrinal premises of progressive realisation and the right to a healthy environment, builds a legal test for identifying what it terms infrastructural secession from the theory of cumulative enclosure, tests the resulting framework against the strongest available objection that private adaptation is a lawful exercise of property and liberty no human rights framework could restrict, and specifies the positive obligations and enforcement architecture that follow once secession is identified. The article argues that existing scholarship on climate apartheid, vulnerability theory, and enclosure has diagnosed the phenomenon this article addresses but has not translated that diagnosis into doctrine, and undertakes that translation across a single sustained argument.

Keywords: Climate Exit; Infrastructural Secession; Shared Vulnerability; Progressive Realisation; Enclosure; Economic Social and Cultural Rights.