Sustainability Commons^™

Navigating Murky Waters: State-Level Strategies For Wetland Preservation And Tile Drainage Regulation After Sackett V. Epa, Caleb M. Swanson

Honors Thesis

Wetlands are some of the world’s most valuable ecosystems, serving as provisioners of species habitat, carbon sequestration, flood mitigation, water quality purification, and other ecosystem services. Human development has resulted in substantial wetland loss the world over. In the 1970s, the United States Congress passed the Clean Water Act, giving the EPA broad authority over wetland protection. However, in the summer of 2023, the United States Supreme Court decided Sackett v. EPA, limiting the EPA’s jurisdiction over wetlands to those indistinguishably connected to generally recognized “Waters of the United States” and removing federal protection for millions of acres of wetlands, …

Reducing Food Scarcity: The Benefits Of Urban Farming, S.A. Claudell, Emilio Mejia

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

Urban farming can enhance the lives of communities and help reduce food scarcity. This paper presents a conceptual prototype of an efficient urban farming community that can be scaled for a single apartment building or an entire community across all global geoeconomics regions, including densely populated cities and rural, developing towns and communities. When deployed in coordination with smart crop choices, local farm support, and efficient transportation then the result isn’t just sustainability, but also increasing fresh produce accessibility, optimizing nutritional value, eliminating the use of ‘forever chemicals’, reducing transportation costs, and fostering global environmental benefits.

Imagine Doris, who is …

Session 5: Banking, Capital Markets, And The Crypto Revolution - A Look Back And Projection Of The Future Of Fintech, Joseph R. Cutler, Lawrence Kaplan, Youssef Sneifer, Jill Williamson

SITIE Symposiums

In Session Five of the SITIE 2023 Symposium: Enabling Innovation in Law and Society, Joseph M. Vincent moderated as the four panelists, Joseph R. Cutler, Lawrence Kaplan, Youssef Sneifer, and Jill Williamson, discussed banking, capital markets, and the crypto revolution by looking back and projecting the future of the financial technology (FinTech) industry. The discussion commenced with a conversation on banking deposits, then moved into a discussion on cryptocurrency companies and the challenges they have faced in recent years in the banking industry. The panelists further discussed artificial intelligence (AI) technology’s impact on FinTech, open banking, and challenges facing cryptocurrency …

Session 4: Fireside Virtual Chat With Bruce Jackson, Associate General Counsel, Microsoft, Bruce Jackson

SITIE Symposiums

Rhymes all have in common? Besides musical talent, they have all been represented by Bruce Jackson, one of the founding partners of the entertainment law firm, Jackson, Brown, Powell, and St. George. Jackson, a Brooklynite and longtime Microsoft attorney, is a force in the legal industry. Jackson started at Microsoft in the year 2000 as Corporate Counsel for the digital media division. Jackson now serves as Associate General Counsel and Managing Director for Strategic Partnerships out of the Office of the President for Microsoft. Jackson recently published his first book, Never Far From Home: My Journey from Brooklyn to Hip …

Session 3: Diversity Enhancing Intellectual Property, Jordi Goodman, Nina Srejovic

SITIE Symposiums

The field of intellectual property suffers from a lack of diversity. Women are underrepresented as credited inventors in the United States. Additionally, multi-gender inventor groups are underrepresented compared to all-male and, sometimes, even all-female groups. This representation has changed over time, with changes not always reflecting an increase in female representation. This is particularly true when studying gender-disparity as it exists in the field of computer programming and software patents. While women were well represented in computer programming at field’s inception, this changed after World War II because men lobbied to push women out of the field. Women have since …

Session 2: Diversity As Key To Innovation - Stem Education, Richard Tapia

SITIE Symposiums

Richard A. Tapia is a professor at Rice University, where he has taught since 1970. Tapi specializes in optimization theory and numerical analysis. It has been his lifelong work to help underrepresented minorities achieve academic success and success in life.

In this talk, Tapia emphasizes the importance of diversity in STEM fields and highlights the failures of the education system in supporting underrepresented minorities. Tapia opines that more efforts need to be made to bring domestic underrepresented minorities into STEM positions and to recognize the value they bring. Tapia believes that, to address the lack of minority representation in STEM …

Session 1b: Innovation In Legal Contracts And Deals - How Lexion Is Incorporating Ai Into Document Revision, Lexion

SITIE Symposiums

Here, Gaurav Oberoi (CEO and Founder, Lexion) & Jessica Nguyen (Chief Legal Officer, Lexion) discuss Lexion and how it will change the legal industry. Lexion seeks to revolutionize how companies manage the contracts that they use. It has begun to corner a particular market in the rapidly growing field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), helping in-house attorneys to improve their workflow by automatically analyzing documents. By using AI, the program can successfully remove what the CEO of Lexion refers to as “low value” work. This allows overworked in-house attorneys to not only do more work in a faster time frame, but …

Session 1a: Innovation In The Delivery Of Legal Services And Access To Justice, Vikktoria

SITIE Symposiums

In session one, Walid Romaya and Tabrez Ebrahim, co-founders of Vikktoria, discuss their company and its contributions to improving access to justice. With a dual focus on achieving a broader access to justice and in providing matchmaking services for legal professionals looking for a larger client base, Vikktoria aims to disrupt the legal services industry through its mobile app. Based in California, Vikktoria has begun to expand to various metro areas around the country and hopes to provide broader access to justice by giving those with little to no legal knowledge an easy way to find a local attorney, book …

Introduction, Steven Bender

SITIE Symposiums

No abstract provided.

A Consumer's Guide To Greenwashing, Katie Fowler

Marketing Undergraduate Honors Theses

Over the past 37 years since the term greenwashing was coined, there have been sparse attempts to regulate this deceptive environmental marketing. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) created its Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims, also known as the Green Guides, in 1992. The Guides have been revised on three separate occasions – 1996, 1998, and 2012 – in an attempt to remain relevant with the proliferation of environmental marketing claims and trends. However, the Guides were created as interpretive rules that do not give the FTC the authority to enforce the regulations unless they can prove that …

Developing Ecological Security Pattern For Coastal Wetlands Based On “Three-Line Integration” Spatial Strategy, Xiaowen Li, Liehui Zhi, Tiantian Ma, Zengli Liu, Baoshan Cui, Dongdong Shao, Yu Cao, Yonglin Mu

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version)

Coastal wetlands function as key socioeconomic resources as well as ecological barriers for sustainable development in coastal regions. Although previous research and practices indicate that restoration of degraded wetlands needs combination with intact natural wetlands to achieve best integrated ecosystem services, this kind of integration is still lacking both in research and practice. In the past decades, increased land reclamation coupling with climate change (e.g. sea level rise) have led considerable coastal squeeze effects and intensified degradation and loss in coastal wetlands along Chinese coastline, restoration of damaged coastal wetlands is therefore urgently needed to enhance the overall ecological functions …

Science, Technology, Society, And Law, Paolo Davide Farah, Justo Corti Varela

Book Chapters

Traditionally, science and technology have been granted as sources of knowledge and objective truth. However, much more recently, they are also seen as human activities, conducted in a social environment. This new approach focuses on the intersections between science, technology and society, and particularly their regulation by the law. Concerns on how to best regulate the interaction come up in modern societies, and when either their use or their impacts are global, international law and international organizations become involved. The impact of the fourfold relation is so high that science and technology are seen as one of the reasons for …

The Interlinkages Science-Technology-Law: Information And Communication Society, Knowledge-Based Economy And The Rule Of Law, Giovanni Bombelli, Paolo Davide Farah

Book Chapters

This chapter focuses on the circular and complex relationship between science, technology, society, and law. The technology/society connection focuses on the democratic deficit issue. The democratic deficit would be a consequence of the lack of adaptability of western democracy to complex (information) societies, where technology (and the increasing access to data that it permits) is separating the connection between information and knowledge (as well as the classical legitimacy couple of democracy-truth) moving these societies towards a technocracy. On one hand, the technology-law circle deals with the progressive reduction of law to a normative technique (since the law is always late …

The Intersections Among Science, Technology, Policy And Law: In Between Truth And Justice, Paolo Davide Farah, Justo Corti Varela

Book Chapters

Different visions on the interaction between science, technology, policy and law have been presented. As common axe, we can detect the continuous search for truth and justice. Science and Law as social constructs, the distinction between truths and opinions through procedural method based on evidence and rationality, or how natural science “things” became facts, and consequently “truth”, are examples of this search. The evidence-gathering process that integrates scientific evidence into trial (sometimes by procedure and other times by a more substantive approach) is another possible approach. Of course, that the game of mutual influence among the four elements creates contradictions …

Sustainability In Public Procurement, Corporate Law And Higher Education (Introduction), Paolo Davide Farah

Book Chapters

Lela Mélon’s edited collection brings a fresh perspective to the intricate relationship between corporations and sustainability. The book focuses on the role of state actors in boosting environmental protection and the increasing importance of state awareness on environmental crises. Whether it is procurement, or education or corporate governance, we are witnessing a proactive stance of the state that is balancing economic growth with ecological concerns. The difficulties faced in forcing a particular conduct in the private sphere is reviewed in detail in the book, along with national laws and regulations that, rather than promoting environmental protection, have had the opposite …

Power Play: The President's Role In Shaping Renewable Energy Regulation And Policy, Luke Bartol

Honors Projects

With the impacts of climate change becoming more and more apparent every day, finding means of effective action to mitigate its effects become increasingly critical. While localized work can play an important role, federal action is necessary to have the most widespread and effective impact, especially on interconnected issues such as clean energy. Congressional action is the avenue of change at this level, however in an increasingly partisan and divided environment, progress on this front is far short of what is needed.

Looking to the president is logical here, both as a single actor more insulated from partisan fights, but …

Comments On U.S. Funding For Ghg Corporate Reporting Standardization, Columbia Center On Sustainable Investment, Sabin Center For Climate Change Law

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment

The Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (“CCSI”) and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law (“Sabin Center”) are pleased to submit our joint comments on how appropriations made to the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (“IRA”) can best be used to enhance the agency’s efforts to standardize corporate climate commitments, improve transparency around greenhouse gas reductions, and accelerate progress towards decarbonization in the corporate sphere. This Comment focuses on the funding provided to the EPA under Section 60111, on Greenhouse Gas (“GHG”) Reporting.

Net Zero Roadmap For Copper And Nickel, Columbia Center On Sustainable Investment, Carbon Trust, Rmi, Payne Institute For Public Policy

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment

As we seek to meet the challenges of climate change impacts, many commodities will play an increasing role in decarbonizing economies. There are increasing challenges of addressing the emissions from extraction of these commodities needed to support the zero-carbon transition.

CCSI, in a consortium with Carbon Trust, RMI, and the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines, developed the Net Zero Roadmap to 2050 for Copper and Nickel Value Chains to support the copper and nickel mining sectors in taking collective, coordinated action by providing a clear, approachable, and accepted roadmap for decarbonization.

Our key messages …

Urgenda Vs. Juliana: Lessons For Future Climate Change Litigation Cases, Paolo Davide Farah, Imad Antoine Ibrahim

Articles

No abstract provided.

Climate Justice In The Anthropocene And Its Relationship With Science And Technology: The Importance Of Ethics Of Responsibility, Paolo Davide Farah, Alessio Lo Giudice

Articles

Climate change is a global phenomenon. Therefore, globalization is the necessary hermeneutical horizon to develop an analysis of the metamorphosis climate change could cause at a political, social, and economic level. Within this horizon, this Article shows how the relationship between the concept of the Anthropocene epoch and the request for justice allows for framing a climate-justice and intergenerational equity–focused political interpretation of the effects of climate change. In order to avoid reducing such an interpretation to merely an ideological critique of capitalism, the conception of climate justice needs to be grounded in a rational, ethical model. This Article proposes …

Public Ownership And The Wto In A Post Covid-19 Era: From Trade Disputes To A 'Social' Function, Paolo Davide Farah, Davide Zoppolato

Articles

Public ownership is closely bound to the need of the government to protect and guarantee the well-being of its citizens. Where the market cannot, or does not want to, provide goods and services, the State uses different tools to intervene, influence, and control some aspects of the private sphere of expression of its citizens in the name and interest of the collectivity. Although, in the past century, this behavior was accepted as one of the expressions of the public authority and part of the social contract, this perception has shifted partially in accordance with the wave of privatization programs initiated …

24/7 Clean Energy, Todd Aagaard

University of Colorado Law Review

In the face of the rapidly escalating climate crisis, the electricity sector is moving toward renewable energy. To date, policies and strategies have focused on increasing overall renewable energy generation, with little regard for timing and location. The result has been a misalignment of supply and demand in renewable energy markets. Renewable power projects produce energy when and where it is least expensive, leaving supply scarce at other times and places. Consumers, meanwhile, continue to use power when and where they need it. This mismatch increases the electricity grid’s dependence on fossil fuel–fired electricity to meet electricity demand at times …

Trademark's Grip Over Sustainability, Daniel R. Cahoy

University of Colorado Law Review

Entrepreneurs and larger firms are waking up to the fact that there is a viable market for recycled, repaired, and even upcycled goods. There is also an increasing desire on the consumer end for more sustainable products as well as measures to reduce landfill and other product disposal harms to the environment. Although some legal barriers to this new market are being actively debated, other barriers have taken a back seat and seem primed to surge only when increased business activity exposes the liability. This is the case with trademark law, which has the potential to substantially deter the small-firm …

Recommendations For Sustainable Tourism In Patagonia: An Exploratory Analysis Of Sustainable Tourism In Costa Rica, The Nordic Region, And Thailand’S Communities, Julia K. Lowery

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis explores different levels of governance and its role towards actualizing sustainable tourism in Patagonia. With the growing threat of climate change, international destinations such as Patagonia are looking to continue building their tourism industries in a sustainable way. Through analyzing case studies of national governance in Costa Rica, multi-national governance in the Nordic region, and community-based tourism in Thailand, we can better understand how each form of governance has the potential to create a sustainable tourism industry. With this understanding of successful governance in my case studies, as well as understanding the historical and political forces that have …

Scaling Investment In Renewable Energy Generation To Achieve Sustainable Development Goals 7 (Affordable And Clean Energy) And 13 (Climate Action) And The Paris Agreement: Roadblocks And Drivers, Mithatcan Aydos, Perrine Toledano, Martin Dietrich Brauch, Ladan Mehranvar, Theodoros Iliopoulos, Sunayana Sasmal

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment

The zero-carbon energy transition is the solution to the 2022 energy crisis and a fundamental part of the solution to the global climate crisis. Yet, there are relatively low levels of investment in renewable energy in developing countries, hindering their achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and contribution to the Paris Agreement goals.

In 2021, the Asia–Pacific region (excluding China) accounted for less than 8% of investments in energy transition technologies, Latin America and the Caribbean for less than 4%, and Africa and the Middle East for less than 2%. Annual investment in zero-carbon energy in developing economies other …

Conflicts Between Ghg Accounting Methodologies In The Steel Industry, John Biberman, Perrine Toledano, Baihui Lei, Max Lulavy, Rohini Ram Mohan

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment

Accurate, verifiable, and comparable greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions data throughout supply chains in the materials sector are necessary to drive decarbonization. This is particularly the case for the steel supply chain, a major source of GHG emissions with untapped potential for reduction. However, emissions accounting methods used by the steel industry suffer from gaps and misalignment, resulting in significant differences in reported GHG emissions. The result is a patchwork reporting landscape vulnerable to manipulation and miscommunication, generating little actionable data for policymakers, producers, customers, and investors. These shortcomings highlight the need for a harmonized carbon accounting framework for the steel …

Scaling Investment In Renewable Energy: Roadblocks And Drivers – Executive Summary, Mithatcan Aydos, Perrine Toledano, Martin Dietrich Brauch, Ladan Mehranvar, Theodoros Iliopoulos, Sunayana Sasmal

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment

The zero-carbon energy transition is the solution to the 2022 energy crisis and a fundamental part of the solution to the global climate crisis. Yet, there are relatively low levels of investment in renewable energy in developing countries, hindering their achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and contribution to the Paris Agreement goals.

In 2021, the Asia–Pacific region (excluding China) accounted for less than 8% of investments in energy transition technologies, Latin America and the Caribbean for less than 4%, and Africa and the Middle East for less than 2%. Annual investment in zero-carbon energy in developing economies other …

A Not-So-Clean Slate: A Progress Report Of Pa’S Automated Record Sealing Law, Matt B. Saboe, Tekia Huger-Burton

Sustainability Research & Practice Seminar Presentations

Professor Matt B. Saboe, Economics and Finance, and Tekia Huger-Burton - A Not-So-Clean Slate: A Progress Report of PA’s Automated Record Sealing Law

A Qualitative Look Into Repair Practices, Jumana Labib

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

This research poster is based on a working research paper which moves beyond the traditional scope of repair and examines the Right to Repair movement from a smaller, more personal lens by detailing the 6 categorical impediments as dubbed by Dr. Alissa Centivany (design, law, economic/business strategy, material asymmetry, informational asymmetry, and social impediments) have continuously inhibited repair and affected repair practices, which has consequently had larger implications (environmental, economic, social, etc.) on ourselves, our objects, and our world. The poster builds upon my research from last year (see "The Right to Repair: (Re)building a better future"), this time pulling …

Session 4: Plunging Into Deep Water: An Immersion In Fintech, Defi (Decentralized Finance), & Web3, Joseph M. Vincent

SITIE Symposiums

This panel featured entrepreneurs providing their expert insight into the background, workings, and expected developments of the FinTech industry. Moderated by Adjunct Professor of Law Joseph M. Vincent, the panel features Ron Oliveira, Kory Hoang, and Jonathan Blanco.

The panelists provided insight on topics regarding: (1) the fundamental changes in financial services since the advent of FinTech; (2) background on the Stablecoin industry including a background of what Stablecoin is, and why it has been under recent scrutiny; and (3) the NFT market and the direction the NFT space is heading. In a Q&A session, the panelists also offered their …