Law Commons^™

Beyond The North–South Divide: Litigation's Role In Resolving Climate Change Loss And Damage Claims, Maria Antonia Tigre, Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Within the international climate regime, legal aspects surrounding loss and damage (L&D) are contentious topics, implicating liability, compensation and notions of vulnerability. The attribution of responsibility and the pursuit of redress for L&D present intricate legal and governance challenges. The ongoing debates under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change are characterized by a pronounced North–South divide and have done little to provide tangible support to those most affected by L&D. This apparent neglect has prompted exploration of alternative avenues for climate harm redress. The burgeoning field of litigation for liability and compensation of climate harm holds potential significance …

Transnational Insights For Climate Litigation At The European Court Of Human Rights: A South-North Perspective In Pursuit Of Climate Justice, Melanie Murcott, Maria Antonia Tigre, Nesa Zimmermann

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

The global climate crisis is increasingly recognised as an issue of climate injustice, including because it is causing (and worsening) inequalities and human rights violations. Moreover, responsibility for emissions and vulnerability to climate impacts are not evenly distributed. They vary among and within states. In order to tackle these issues of justice both within and among states, litigants have taken to domestic and regional courts to engage in climate litigation. A body of transnational climate jurisprudence is emerging in which courts are increasingly looking to laws beyond their relevant state or region, engaging with the moral aims of human rights …

Ccsi Submission To The Special Rapporteur On Human Rights And The Environment: Investor-State Dispute Settlement (Isds) Mechanisms And The Right To A Clean, Healthy, And Sustainable Environment, Columbia Center On Sustainable Investment

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment

CCSI Submission to the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment on investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms and the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, submitted in June 2023.

Commentary: Nature-Based Insetting: A Harmful Distraction From Corporate Decarbonization, Nora Mardirossian, Jack Arnold

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment

Carbon offsetting is used worldwide on a massive scale, purportedly to mitigate climate change by capturing atmospheric carbon or by increasing or protecting carbon storage. Yet, in recent years, offsetting has been increasingly criticized as a strategy that can harm Indigenous peoples and local communities, exacerbate land inequality, and, paradoxically, worsen the global climate crisis. “Carbon insetting” has emerged as an alternative approach to offsetting that localizes nature-based solutions projects and other greenhouse gas removal activities within company value chains and has been adopted by major global brands such as Nestlé, PepsiCo, and Burberry. This commentary takes a deep dive …

Achieving Climate Justice Through Land Back: An Overview Of Tribal Dispossession, Land Return Efforts, And Practical Mechanisms For #Landback, Vanessa Racehorse

Faculty Scholarship

Due to the increasing pressures of the climate change crisis, federal and state governments are beginning to acknowledge that Indigenous-led stewardship and control over Tribal aboriginal homelands is a crucial component of addressing climate change. In the United States, Tribal nations have a long history of responsible land stewardship, with environmental conservation and respect for the world's biodiversity being an inextricable piece of Tribal customs, traditions, and knowledge. This Article strives to pay due respect to traditional land stewardship and its important role in the past, present, and future.

Part I of this Article starts with an overview of the …

Climate Choice Architecture, Felix Mormann

Faculty Scholarship

Personal choices drive global warming nearly as much as institutional decisions. Yet, policymakers overwhelmingly target large-scale industrial facilities for reductions in carbon emissions, with individual and household emissions a mere afterthought. Recent advances in behavioral economics, cognitive psychology, and related fields have produced a veritable behavior change revolution. Subtle changes to the choice environment, or nudges, have improved stake-holder decision-making in a wide range of contexts, from healthier food choices to better retirement planning. But the vast potential of choice architecture remains largely untapped for purposes of climate policy and action. This Article explores that untapped potential and makes the …

Panel: Climate Change And Climate Justice, Alice Kaswan, Michael B. Gerrard, Monica Esparza, J.B. Ruhl

Faculty Scholarship

This article is a transcript of a panel discussion from the 2022 Richmond Public Interest Law Review's Symposium on Environmental Justice.

Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Benefit To Climate-Displaced And Host Communities, Gül Aktürk, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Climate change is borderless, and its impacts are not shared equally by all communities. It causes an imbalance between people by creating a more desirable living environment for some societies while erasing settlements and shelters of some others. Due to floods, sea level rise, destructive storms, drought, and slow-onset factors such as salinization of water and soil, people lose their lands, homes, and natural resources. Catastrophic events force people to move voluntarily or involuntarily. The relocation of communities is a debatable climate adaptation measure which requires utmost care with human rights, ethics, and psychological well-being of individuals upon the issues …

A Relational Analysis Of Enterprise Obligations And Carbon Majors For Climate Justice, Sara L. Seck

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

A coherent theory of climate justice must answer the question of “who owes what to whom, and why?” In this paper I consider this question with a focus on the contribution of business enterprises, in particular the ‘carbon majors’, to climate injustice. I will first introduce a relational approach to legal analysis, drawing upon the work of feminist and vulnerability theorists, Indigenous feminist theorists, and feminist corporate and international law theorists. This relational approach confronts the dominant yet unacknowledged prevalence of the bounded autonomous individual of liberal thought in diverse areas of law and policy, and offers a method not …

The Paris Agreement And Global Climate Litigation After The Trump Withdrawal, David Hunter

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The article addresses the emergence of cases in many countries around the world that are addressing climate change by enforcing, or at least referring to, the Paris Agreement.

Recent Developments In Climate Justice, Randall S. Abate, Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Maria Antonia Tigre, Patricia Ferreira, Wil Burns

Journal Publications

Climate justice can be defined generally as addressing the disproportionate burden of climate change impacts on poor and marginalized communities. It seeks to promote more equitable allocation of these burdens at the local, national, and global levels through proactive regulatory initiatives and reactive judicial remedies that draw on international human rights and domestic environmental justice theories. Yet, efforts to define climate justice as a field of inquiry remain elusive and underinclusive; a recent book, Climate Justice: Case Studies in Global and Regional Governance Challenges (ELI Press 2016), seeks to fill that void by providing an overview of the landscape of …

Revisiting Transnational Corporations And Extractive Industries: Climate Justice, Feminism, And State Sovereignty, Sara Seck

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This Article explicitly examines the relationship between climate justice, gender, and transnational fossil fuel extractive industries by drawing upon feminist theoretical insights. First, I provide an overview of the differential impacts of climate change on women and briefly review insights from select international legal scholars who have considered gender and climate change. Second, I describe the Philippines climate petition, a novel attempt to seek an investigation into the accountability of transnational fossil fuel companies for climate harms. Third, I examine three sets of issues arising in the Philippines climate petition and draw explicitly upon Karen Knop’s Re/Statements: Feminism and State …

Clean Electrification, Shelley Welton

Faculty Publications

To combat climate change, many leading states have adopted the aim of creating a “participatory” grid. In this new model, electricity is priced based on time of consumption and carbon content, and consumers are encouraged to adjust their behavior and adopt new technologies to maintain affordable electricity. Although a more participatory grid is an important component of lowering greenhouse gas emissions, it also raises a new problem of clean energy justice: utilities and consumer advocates claim that such policies unjustly benefit the rich at the expense of the poor, given the type of consumer best able to participate in the …

Climate Change Meets The Law Of The Horse, J.B. Ruhl, James Salzman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The climate change policy debate has only recently turned its full attention to adaptation - how to address the impacts of climate change we have already begun to experience and that will likely increase over time. Legal scholars have in turn begun to explore how the many different fields of law will and should respond. During this nascent period, one overarching question has gone unexamined: how will the legal system as a whole organize around climate change adaptation? Will a new distinct field of climate change adaptation law and policy emerge, or will legal institutions simply work away at the …

Public Nuisance Suits For The Climate Justice Movement: The Right Thing And The Right Time, Randall S. Abate

Journal Publications

The climate justice movement seeks to provide relief to vulnerable communities that have been disproportionately affected by climate change impacts. Public nuisance litigation for climate change impacts is a new and growing field that could provide the legal and policy underpinnings to help secure a viable foundation for climate justice in the United States and internationally. By securing victories in the court system, these suits may succeed where the domestic environmental justice movement failed in seeking to merge environmental protection and human rights concerns into an actionable legal theory. This Article first examines the nature and scope of the climate …

Human Rights Implications Of Climate Change, David Hunter

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Slides: "Mitaku Oyasin" Means "We Are All Related", Bob Gough

Shifting Baselines and New Meridians: Water, Resources, Landscapes, and the Transformation of the American West (Summer Conference, June 4-6)

Presenter: Bob Gough, NativeEnergy, Inc.

72 slides

Indigenous Peoples And Environmental Justice: The Impact Of Climate Change, Rebecca Tsosie

The Climate of Environmental Justice: Taking Stock (March 16-17)

Presenter: Rebecca Tsosie, Professor of Law, Arizona State University

1 page.

Action On Global Warming: Making Room For Tribal Governments In The New Kind Of Wedge Issue, Dean B. Suagee

The Climate of Environmental Justice: Taking Stock (March 16-17)

Presenter: Dean B. Suagee, Of Counsel, Hobbs, Straus, Dean & Walker LLP, Washington, D.C.

1 page.

Climate Justice: The Next Movement [Outline], Richard J. Lazarus

The Climate of Environmental Justice: Taking Stock (March 16-17)

Presenter: Richard J. Lazarus, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center

2 pages.

Climate Changes And The Poorest Nations: Further Reflections On Global Inequality, Ruth Gordon

The Climate of Environmental Justice: Taking Stock (March 16-17)

Presenter: Ruth Gordon, Professor of Law, Villanova University School of Law

3 pages.

Agenda: The Climate Of Environmental Justice: Taking Stock, University Of Colorado Boulder. School Of Law

The Climate of Environmental Justice: Taking Stock (March 16-17)

On March 16-17, The Climate of Environmental Justice: Taking Stock conference gathered 125 academics and practitioners from around the country to consider the pressing issues facing low-income and/or communities of color that continue to be subjected to a disproportionate share of environmental maladies.

"Some people are more equal than others when it comes to bracing ourselves for the impacts of climate change," said conference organizer Professor Maxine Burkett. "Whether it's because poor folks lived in the lowest areas of New Orleans when Katrina floodwaters rushed in, or are less able to afford the cooling bill during increasingly frequent heat waves, …