Recent Developments in Climate Justice

• Date: 01 December 2017

12-2017 NEWS & ANALYSIS 47 ELR 11005

D I A L O G U E

Recent Developments

in Climate Justice



Climate justice can be dened 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 domes-

tic environmental justice theories. Yet, eorts to dene

climate justice as a eld of inquiry remain elusive and

underinclusive; a recent book, C J: C

S  G  R G

C (ELI Press 2016), seeks to ll that void

by providing an overview of the landscape of climate

justice from a variety of legal and geographic perspec-

tives. On March 10, 2017, ELI convened the book’s

editor and three contributing authors to discuss cur-

rent developments. Below, we present a transcript of

the seminar, which has been edited for style, clarity,

and space considerations.

Rachel Jean-Baptiste (moderator) is a Senior Attorney at

the Environmental Law Institute.

Randall S. Abate is the Associate Dean for Academic Aairs

and Professor of Law at Florida A&M College of Law.

Maria Antonia Tigre is a Senior Attorney in the

Environment Program at the Cyrus R . Vance Center for

International Justice.

Dr. Patricia Ferreira is a Law Foundation of Ontario

Scholar, Windsor Law, and a Fellow at t he Center for

International Governance Innovation, Canada.

Dr. Wil Burns is founding Co-Director of the Forum

for Climate Engineering Assessment at the School of

International Service, American University.

Rachel Jean-Baptiste: Today, we are discussing climate

justice, with a focus on the volume Climate Justice: Case

.1 e

book draws on 29 contributors from 16 dierent nations,

and oers proposed solutions to a variety of reg ulatory

1. C J: C S  G  R G

C (Randall S. Abate ed., ELI Press 2016).

obstacles under international law, U.S. law, and foreign

domestic law. I am pleased that we have speakers on a few

of those topics, including the book’s editor, as well as three

of the contributing authors.

Randall S. Abate is the associate dean for academic

aairs and professor of law at Florida A&M College of

Law. He is our moderator and the editor of Climate Jus-

tice. He will be talking about atmospheric trust litigation.

Next, will be Maria Antonia Tigre. She is a senior attor-

ney in the environmental law program at the Cyrus R.

Vance Center for International Justice. She will focus on

the global repercussions of the Dutch case -

dation.2 Next, will be Dr. Patricia Ferreira. She is the Law

Foundation of Ontario Scholar at Windsor Law, Canada.

She will address the Paris Agreement3 and the concept of

dierentiation. Last but not lea st is Dr. Wil Burns. He is

the founding co-director of the Forum for Climate Engi-

neering Assessment at the School of International Service,

American University, and he is also a senior fellow at the

Centre for International Governance Innovation’s Interna-

tional Law Research Program. He will discuss t he human

rights dimensions of bioenergy with carbon capture and

storage (BECCS).

I. Atmospheric Trust Litigation:

Pipe Dream or Pipeline to Justice

for Future Generations?

Randall S. Abate: It is great to see such robust interest in

this topic. is book was truly a labor of love, with experts

from around the world on dierent aspects of what cli-

mate justice means. And this panel is a snapshot of the

coverage of the book to give a sense of dierent ways in

which climate justice has manifested itself in the courts,

and through international treaty negotiations and interna-

tional human rights frameworks.

I am going to focus on a case that has drawn signicant

attention in the United States. In an era in which we a re a

bit depressed as environmental lawyers, seeing some over-

whelming challenges on the horizon, one case has brought

a glimmer of hope to our cause. at case is Juliana v.

2. Urgenda Foundation v. State of the Netherlands (Ministry of Infrastructure

and the Environment), Den Haag [Hague District Court] 24 juni 2015,

ECLI:NL:RBDHA:2015:7196 (Stichting Urgenda/Nederlanden).

3. , UNFCCC Conference of the Parties, 21st

Sess., U.N. Doc. FCCC/CP/2015/10/Add.1 (Dec. 12, 2015), http://un-

fccc.int/les/home/application/pdf/paris_agreement.pdf.

Copyright © 2017 Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, DC. Reprinted with permission from ELR®, http://www.eli.org, 1-800-433-5120.