Climate Protection as a Priority of Life Preservation: An Anthropological and Systemic Perspective on the New Human Rights

This conceptual working paper develops a justification for treating climate protection as a fundamental political priority, drawing on Jean-Pol Martin’s New Human Rights (NHR) and their organismic foundation. The argument connects life preservation with six equally important basic needs: thinking, health, security, social inclusion, self-realisation and participation, and meaning. Climate science establishes the risks to ecological conditions of life; the NHR framework provides the normative criterion for evaluating political responses. The paper distinguishes the priority of climate protection from any unconditional precedence of individual climate measures. Its specific contribution is the integration of three dimensions: protection of ecological life conditions, socially accessible opportunities to act, and scrutiny of the relationship between knowledge and institutional power. The right to think is developed as a requirement for collaborative inquiry, transparent evidence and effective participation. Institutional self-preservation is examined as a possible obstacle to implementation, alongside alternative explanations such as limited resources and unclear responsibilities. Within the LdL/NHR and human–AI working-paper series, the article applies the general theoretical architecture to a concrete field of global policy. It proposes three implementation priorities: accountable planning of mitigation and adaptation, participation with feedback, and socially accessible support for action. The paper was developed by Jean-Pol Martin in dialogue with ChatGPT. It is a conceptual contribution rather than a new empirical climate study.