This report, commissioned by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), describes the nexus between climate change, environmental degradation, and the impairment of fundamental human rights, such as the rights to food, water, housing, and life. It explains how governments and other actors can address climate change in a manner consistent with their obligations to respect, protect, promote and fulfill human rights. The report was released during COP21 to help inform the development of the Paris Agreement.
There have been several proposals to include a "climate change displacement coordination facility" in the upcoming UNFCCC agreement, but there has been very little public discussion about what this facility would entail and how it would operate. This briefing note highlights some of the functions that the displacement coordination facility could fulfill, as well as some key questions for negotiators in the lead-up to COP 21 and subsequent talks. The note is not intended to be a proposal for how the facility should operate, nor do the functions highlighted below necessarily reflect what is politically or economically feasible. Rather, the note is intended to outline a broad array of considerations for decision-makers as they contemplate whether and how to proceed with the displacement coordination facility.
In the last several years, cities around the world have taken on a leading role in advancing policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In the United States, dozens of cities have set goals targeting ambitious greenhouse gas emission reductions by a date certain (80% or "net zero" by 2050 are common formulations), and many more have pledged to achieve a 100% renewable or carbon-free energy supply. Many U.S. cities are still determining the policies that would best achieve their climate commitments. In addition to political, financial, and technical considerations, these cities must consider how to structure their policies to comport with federal and state law. Given variable conditions and contexts, cities can't simply "copy and paste" climate policies that have been successful elsewhere. They must consider the contours of their own legally delegated authority. Cities Climate Law: A Legal Framework for Local Action in the U.S. explores and explicates legal issues that might inhibit or enable policy adoption and implementation across a range of municipal carbon mitigation policy areas: Equity, Buildings, Transportation, Energy, and Waste. The report demystifies these sometimes knotty legal questions so that law- and policy-makers can craft informed, creative carbon mitigation policies that address local political and policy concerns while staying within legal bounds, reducing the risk that action will be undone by the courts. U.S. cities are central to national efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help stave off the most dire impacts of climate change. And our cities have long pioneered pathbreaking carbon mitigation law and policy, and will continue to do so. While federal and state law pose distinctive legal challenges, they also provide unique opportunities for enterprising cities to continue to lead the way in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Over the last decade, laws codifying national and international responses to climate change have grown in number, specificity, and importance. As these laws have recognized new rights and created new duties, litigation seeking to challenge either their facial validity or their particular application has followed. So too has litigation aimed at pressing legislators and policymakers to be more ambitious and thorough in their approaches to climate change. In addition, litigation seeking to fill the gaps left by legislative and regulatory inaction has also continued. As a result, courts are adjudicating a growing number of disputes over actions—or inaction—related to climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts.
There is overwhelming scientific agreement that human activities are changing the global climate system and that these changes are already affecting human and natural systems. Significant advances in climate change detection and attribution science – the branch of science that seeks to isolate the effect of human influence on the climate and related earth systems – have continued to clarify the extent to which anthropogenic climate change causes both slow onset changes and extreme events. The spike in deaths and costs associated with extreme events and the prospect for slow onset changes with irreversible impacts has inspired a marked increase in the number of lawsuits seeking to hold different actors – particularly governments and fossil fuel companies – accountable for their contribution to or failure to take action on climate change. Attribution science is central to recent climate litigation, as it informs discussions of responsibility for climate change. Climate science also plays a central role in policymaking and planning, particularly where decisions need to be made about how to allocate the costs of mitigating and adapting to climate change. This Article describes the role that attribution science has played in recent litigation as well as policymaking and planning activities, and discusses future directions in the law and science of climate change attribution, addressing questions such as how attribution science can better support policymaking and help resolve questions of liability and responsibility for climate change.
Strategic litigation has been effective in advancing civil rights and gender equality in the United States and privacy and human rights across Europe. Can lawsuits filed by environmental groups and activists around the world compel corporations and governments to curb carbon emissions? Was an important precedent set when a Dutch court ruled recently that Royal Dutch Shell must reduce its emissions significantly by the year 2030 and to net zero by the year 2050? Do judges have more power to combat climate change by enforcing existing laws or offering new interpretations of constitutional, human rights, and common law principles? Michael Burger '03, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, and Peter Lehner '84 of Earthjustice and a lecturer in law at Columbia Law join host Michael B. Gerrard to discuss new developments in climate-related litigation. ; https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/defending_the_planet/1004/thumbnail.jpg
Congress established the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) in 1968 to reduce flood damages nationwide and ease the federal government's financial burden for providing disaster recovery.1 To achieve this goal, the program was designed to perform three primary functions. First, the program provides federally backed insurance to property owners and renters. Second, the program established minimum requirements for building, land use, and floodplain management practices that local communities must adopt in order for their residents to be eligible to purchase NFIP insurance coverage. Third, the program is responsible for mapping high floodrisk areas. These maps inform local land use decisions as well as the pricing of flood insurance premiums. Theoretically, the NFIP should have deterred development in flood-prone areas, ensured that any new development in the floodplain was designed to minimize the risk of flood damage, and reduced federal expenditures on disaster recovery costs. In practice, the rising debts of the program and growing severity and frequency of flood disasters imply the opposite is true. One significant factor contributing to this shortcoming is that the NFIP is predicated on the assumption that flood risks are static and change little over time. Climate change is proving that assumption to be extremely dangerous and costly. This Comment will assess the current state of the NFIP and the threats to it from climate change (Part I). In addition, it explores several strategies to change the NFIP for a changing climate.
In St. Bernard Parish Government v. United States, Louisiana property owners argued that the U.S. government was liable under takings law for flood damage to their properties caused by Hurricane Katrina and other hurricanes. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit disagreed, however, noting that the government cannot be liable on a takings theory for inaction, and that the government action was not shown to have been the cause of the flooding. On September 6, 2018, the Environmental Law Institute hosted an expert panel to explore this ruling and its potential implications for future litigation in a world of changing climate, extreme weather, and uncertain liability. Below, we present a transcript of the discussion, which has been edited for style, clarity, and space considerations.
The work of M. Burger is supported by the 'Excellence Initiative' of the German Federal and State Governments and the Graduate School of Computational Engineering at Technische Universität Darmstadt. The work of C. Schröppel and J. Wackerfuß is financially supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) via the Emmy Noether Program under Grant No. Wa 2514/3-1.
On January 20, 2017, Inauguration Day, the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School launched the Climate Deregulation Tracker, the first of what would become numerous online trackers, news reports, academic analyses, and other resources designed to spotlight the Trump administration's use and abuse of executive authority to pursue its agenda to cut back on government regulations and to promote the extraction and use of fossil fuels. The Climate Deregulation Tracker has had a relatively narrow purpose: to keep tabs on the Trump administration's efforts to dismantle the federal government's climate-related regulations and policies and help inform members of the public so they more effectively voice their views on deregulation. In the almost four years since its launch, the Tracker has logged 159 executive branch actions that fit the bill. President Trump's actions have frequently taken the form of executive orders that describe national policies, such as prioritizing fossil fuel production and distribution, emphasizing economic uses of natural resources, expediting federal environmental reviews for infrastructure projects, and decreasing emissions and efficiency standards across the board. The President's executive orders have resulted in numerous agency actions designed to achieve outcomes consistent with the orders' stated policies. Examples include rules delaying, rescinding, and replacing greenhouse gas emissions standards for power plants, automobiles, oil and gas operations and landfills, and the revocation of policies and guidance that incorporate climate impacts into federal permitting, investment and other decision making.
