Law Commons^™

Framing The Global Pact For The Environment: Why It’S Needed, What It Does, And How It Does It, Teresa Parejo Navajas, Nathan Lobel

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

We face a critical environmental crisis. Humanity consumes unsustainably; we use resources at a rate fifty percent faster than they are reproduced by the planet. The population is growing exponentially and climate change, the most important challenge of this century, is already wreaking havoc around the world. Despite numerous existing international environmental treaties, the Earth, and, therefore, human safety and prosperity, is in peril. According to a recent study by scientists from Stanford University and the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the ongoing “sixth mass extinction” threatens to cause an “assault on the foundations of human civilization.” In November 2017, …

Il Contributo Delle Compagnie Oil & Gas Nel Raggiungimento Degli Obiettivi Energetici E Climatici (How Oil And Gas Companies Can Help Meet The Global Goals On Energy And Climate Change), Lisa E. Sachs, Nicolas Maennling, Perrine Toledano

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Nel settembre 2015, i governi di tutto il mondo hanno adottato17 Obiettivi di Sviluppo Sostenibile (Sustainable Development Goals – SDG) e, pochi mesi dopo – a dicembre – hanno firmatol’Accordo di Parigi. Queste azioni sono la riprova delrafforzamento del consenso globalecirca la necessità di frenare il cambiamento climatico indotto dalle attività antropiche e dipromuovere uno sviluppo sostenibilesu scala mondiale. I due concetti sono infatti strettamente legati: l’urgenza di affrontare il cambiamento climatico va inquadrata nella cornice degli sforzi globali tesi a ridurre la povertà, promuovere la crescita economica, rispettare i diritti umani e di inclusione sociale.

On September 2015, governments …

Environmental And Social Sustainability In The Boardroom, Jon Lukomnik

Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership

The last 10 years has seen a remarkable shift in the attention and importance of social and environmental issues for public corporations. This has meant an increased focus by boards on these important matters.

Climate change, human rights, corporate political influence, and inequality are just some of the issues that are being raised by shareholders and other stakeholders. As calls for corporate transparency grow, how boards incorporate these issues into their decision making processes, disclose them, and address them from a risk perspective will continue to garner attention.

Going Negative: The Next Horizon In Climate Engineering Law, Tracy Hester, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

As the global community struggles to turn the Paris Agreement’s commitments into meaningful emission reductions and the United States turbulently reverses its climate policies, the potential role of “negative emissions technologies” and other climate engineering approaches is drawing increasingly serious attention. These technologies are engineering on the grandest scale: climate engineering seeks to offset the effects of anthropogenic climate change by either altering the solar radiation reaching the earth’s surface or changing the composition of the atmosphere itself. Specifically, negative emissions technologies would directly remove greenhouse gases (GHGs) from the ambient air and help to remove accumulated atmospheric carbon dioxide …

Patterns Of Climate Change Litigation During Trump Era, Michael B. Gerrard, Edward Mctiernan

Faculty Scholarship

Litigation about climate change took off in the early 2000s. Its focus has varied with the occupant of the White House. Under George W. Bush, most suits were brought by environmental groups and blue states, frustrated by the lack of federal action, seeking to push regulations or impede fossil fuel projects. Under Barack Obama, climate litigation was mostly industry and red states seeking to block regulations. And now under Donald Trump, it is largely about environmental groups and blue states trying to preserve the rules adopted under President Obama, and to seek novel remedies to get around federal hostility to …

Expertise Scientifique Et Lien De Causalité Dans Le Cadre Du Contentieux Climatique: Le Point De Vue De La Doctrine Américaine, Michael Burger

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Au cours des dernières années, il y a eu une augmentation remarquable du nombre d’actions judiciaires visant à demander aux Gouvernements et aux acteurs privés de rendre des comptes de leur inaction face aux changements climatiques. La « science de l’attribution » du changement climatique – c’est-à-dire la capacité de détecter les changements environnementaux et de les attribuer à l’augmentation des émissions de gaz à effet de serre – joue un rôle central dans bon nombre de ces actions : elle permet en effet de fonder à la fois l’attribution d’événements extrêmes au changement climatique et d’émissions de gaz à …

Changing International Law For A Changing Climate, Daniel C. Esty, Dena P. Adler

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

After more than two decades of inadequate international efforts to address climate change resulting from rising greenhouse gas emissions, the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement shifted gears. That agreement advances a “bottom-up” model of global cooperation that requires action commitments from all national governments and acknowledges the important role that cities, states, provinces, and businesses must play in delivering deep decarbonization. Given the limited control that presidents and prime ministers have over many of the policies and choices that determine their countries’ carbon footprints, the Paris Agreement missed an opportunity to formally recognize the climate change action commitments of mayors, …

The Built Environment, Justin Gundlach, Jennier Klein

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

The built environment, which includes not only buildings but infrastructure, mediates several important climate impacts on public health and is also subject to diverse legal requirements. It is a subject of particular focus for policy efforts aimed at promoting adaptive responses to climate change on the part of institutions and individuals. This chapter presents key examples of public health impacts that arise from climate change but are mediated – possibly mitigated, possibly exacerbated - by elements of the built environment. It also describes the process and substance of adaptive responses to those impacts. Having presented these physical and policy contexts …

Microgrids And Resilience To Climate-Driven Impacts On Public Health, Justin Gundlach

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

“Resilience” has burst into the lexicons of several policy areas in recent years, owing in no small part to climate change’s amplification of extreme events that severely disrupt the operation of natural, social, and engineered systems. Fostering resilience means anticipating severe disruptions and planning, investing, and designing so that such disruptions, which are certain to occur, are made shallower in depth and shorter in duration. Thus a resilient system or community can continue functioning despite disruptive events, return more swiftly to routine function following disruption, and incorporate new information so as to improve operations in extremis and speed future restorations. …

Climate Change Impacts On The Bulk Power System: Assessing Vulnerabilities And Planning For Resilience, Justin Gundlach, Romany M. Webb

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

As the scale, speed, and implications of climate change come into focus, stakeholders in the electricity sector are finding it increasingly difficult to turn a blind eye. However, many have opted to attend to climate impacts in a piecemeal fashion, often merely responding to particular extreme events – or types of extreme events, such as coastal storms or floods – and failing to consider the larger phenomenon. This is true of the bulk power system (BPS) in regions overseen by Independent System Operators and Regional Transmission Organizations (collectively, ISO/RTOs), none of which have comprehensively assessed their systems’ vulnerabilities to climate …

U.S. Climate Change Litigation In The Age Of Trump: Year One, Dena P. Adler

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

In its first year, the Trump Administration undertook a program of extensive climate change deregulation. The Administration delayed and initiated the reversal of rules that reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from stationary and mobile sources; sought to expedite fossil fuel development, including in previously protected areas; delayed or withdrew energy efficiency standards; undermined consideration of climate change in environmental review; and hindered adaptation to the impacts of climate change. However, the Trump Administration’s efforts have met with constant resistance, with those committed to climate protections bringing legal challenges to many, if not most, of the rollbacks.

This paper seeks to …

Deploying Advanced Metering Infrastructure On The Natural Gas System: Regulatory Challenges And Opportunities, Romany M. Webb

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Recent increases in domestic natural gas use have been widely heralded as a vital step in the fight against climate change. Proponents often characterize natural gas as a “clean” fossil fuel, emphasizing that its combustion produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions than coal and oil (per unit of energy produced). Natural gas combustion still emits large amounts of carbon dioxide, however. Natural gas production and transportation also result in emissions, primarily in the form of methane, which is a highly potent greenhouse gas, with approximately eight-four times the climate impacts of carbon dioxide (on a pound-for-pound basis, over a twenty-year time …

Turning The Tide In Coastal And Riverine Energy Infrastructure Adaptation: Can An Emerging Wave Of Litigation Advance Preparation For Climate Change?, Dena P. Adler

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

A new wave of “failure to adapt” lawsuits has sought to clarify how a changing climate may change what reasonable preparations governments and private actors must take, including increasing the resilience of their infrastructure. These suits span constitutional, tort, and statutory law more broadly, but unprepared owners of energy infrastructure may risk additional violations under environmental law due to unpermitted releases of air and water pollution during extreme weather events for which they are not adequately prepared. This piece will specifically consider recent legal and administrative suits that may indicate shifting legal responsibilities for coastal and riverine energy infrastructure owners …

Climate Change And Human Trafficking After The Paris Agreement, Michael Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

At least 21 million people globally are victims of human trafficking, typically involving either sexual exploitation or forced labor. This form of modern-day slavery tends to increase after natural disasters or conflicts where large numbers of people are displaced from their homes and become highly vulnerable. In the decades to come, climate change will very likely lead to a large increase in the number of people who are displaced and thus vulnerable to trafficking. The Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 established objectives to limit global temperature increases, but the voluntary pledges made by nearly every country fall far short of …

Heat Waves: Legal Adaptation To The Most Lethal Climate Disaster (So Far), Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The worst heatwave in modern history occurred in Russia in 2010; its rare combination of extreme temperatures and long duration killed an estimated 55,000 people. Under an RCP 8.5 scenario, comparable heat waves could occur every two years in the eastern United States by the end of the century, and by then in Europe, the legendary heat wave of 2003 “would be classed as an anomalously cold summer relative to the new climate.” These increased temperatures and heat waves are not just occurring randomly. The science is clear that human activities – mostly greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation – are …

Join The Parties: 25+ Ways To Promote Participation In Multilateral Environmental Agreements, Susan Biniaz

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Negotiators of multilateral environmental agreements are frequently faced with the challenge of striking the right balance between stringency of commitment and breadth of participation. A perfect agreement on paper, with strong commitments and a robust compliance mechanism, might attract too few Parties (or too few key Parties) to achieve the agreement’s environmental objective. Conversely, broad participation in a weak agreement might also fail to accomplish the agreement’s goals.

This paper focuses on the various ways in which negotiators have worked to encourage participation in multilateral environmental agreements. In some cases, they involve steps taken before and during the negotiation of …

L’Évolution Des Actions En Justice Climatique Aux États-Unis, De George W. Bush À Donald Trump, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Les États-Unis ont plus de procès sur le climat que tous les autres pays dumonde réunis. La nature du litige a tendance à varier selon le parti qui détient la Maison Blanche. Pendant les administrations démocrates (Barack Obama), les poursuites ont tendance à être intentées par des sociétés industrielles et des États à tendance républicaine, alléguant que le Gouvernement fédéral en fait trop pour lutter contre le changement climatique. Pendant les administrations républicaines (George W. Bush, Donald J. Trump), la plupart des poursuites sont intentées par des groupes environnementaux et des États démocrates, alléguant que le Gouvernement fédéral en fait …

America’S Relation To World Order: Two Indictments, Two Thought Experiments, And A Misquotation, Philip C. Bobbitt

Faculty Scholarship

The State is undergoing a crisis of legitimacy owing to its inability to cope with novel problems of weapons proliferation, transnational threats including climate change, a fragile global financial infrastructure, cultural influences carried by electronic communications, and an undemocratic regime of human rights law. These fatal inadequacies are summoning forth a new constitutional order, the latest in a series of century-spanning archetypal regimes that have arisen since the Renaissance and the collapse of feudalism. A backlash against the harbingers of this new order, however, is crippling the development of those modes of action that are required to deal with the …

Legal Tools For Cities To Cope With Extreme Heat, Michael B. Gerrard, Edward Mctiernan

Faculty Scholarship

Heat causes more deaths in the U.S. than any other natural hazard – more than floods, hurricanes, or tornadoes. As a result of climate change, it is getting worse. Average annual temperatures are now about 1.8°F higher than they were over the period 1895-2016, they will go up to about 2.5°F by mid-century, and if greenhouse gas emissions continue on the current path, they could rise almost 12°F by 2100, and heat waves that now occur once every 20 years could become annual events, according to the U.S. Global Change Research Program.