 Welcome everyone. I welcome you to the 12th annual Douglas M. Johnston lecture hosted by the Marine and Environmental Law Institute and the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Dalhousie University is located in McMonkey, an ancestral and unceded territory of the McMonkey. And it's important to acknowledge that here in Nova Scotia, we are all treaty people. Also, since the early 1600s, Nova Scotia has been home to a distinct people known as African Nova Scotians. And today we're delighted to welcome you to this joint lecture entitled race, climate justice and international law, featuring our two very distinguished guests, professors, Carmen Gonzalez and James Gotti. My name is Sarah Sack, and I'm a faculty member here at the Schulich School of Law and Marine and Environmental Law Institute. I'm joined today by my colleague and co-host, Olobisi Akinkukbi, who will be fielding questions to pose for our speakers toward the end of our session. We invite you to pose those questions in the chat. We're delighted to co-present today's event with Afronomics Law Blog, and with the Global Network for Human Rights in the Environment. And we also acknowledge funding support from Shirk. Before I introduce our speakers, I'd like to share a few words about Douglas M. Johnston in whose honor this annual event is held. The first Douglas M. Johnston lecture was held in 2009. The speakers are selected for their demonstrated leadership in the field of public policy and their interest in promoting social and environmental justice. Douglas M. Johnston lived from 1931 to 2006. He was born and educated first in Scotland, then completed graduate degrees at McGill and Yale, where he studied with Myers McDougal and Harold Lasswell, and developed a lifelong affinity with a policy science approach to international law. In 1972, the ocean beckoned, and Johnston and his family moved to Halifax, where he took up a position with the law school at Dalhousie. Over the next 15 years, Johnston was central to launching the law school's doctoral program and the development of the marine and environmental law program. At the same time, he provided advisory and consultative services to, amongst others, the government of Canada and the IUCN. He also co-founded and directed both the multidisciplinary Dalhousie Ocean Studies program and the Southeast Asian program in ocean law policy management, which is centered in Bangkok, Thailand. In addition, he published groundbreaking scholarly works on the regulation of international fisheries, the theory of ocean boundary treaty law, and the history of international law. In his last book, the historical foundations of world order, the tower and the arena, was completed very shortly before he died and received a posthumous award for preeminent contribution to creative scholarship from the American Society of International Law in 2009. He's being described as a modest man who was very generous to students and colleagues with an inspiring personality and a sharp theoretical mind, who profoundly influenced the future careers of many of his students. We are truly honored to have with us here this evening two very special guests to share their expertise on the theme of race, climate justice, and international law. Carmen Gonzalez is the Morris I. Liebman Professor of Law at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Carmen is a world-renowned expert in international environmental law, human rights and the environmental justice and food security, and has participated in environmental law capacity building projects in Asia, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union. Among her many other contributions, she's co editor of the critically acclaimed book presumed incompetent, the intersections of race and class for women in academia. Recent co edited books include international environmental law in the global south, energy justice US and international perspectives, and the forthcoming Cambridge handbook of environmental justice and sustainable development. She's also professor, professor emerita at Seattle University School of Law. Our second speaker, James Gotti is the wingtatt lead chair in international law and professor of law also at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. James is a founding member of the third world approaches to international law network and an elected member of the International Academy of International Law. He is the editor of the Afronomics law blog, as well as of the African Journal of International Economic Law. He's a key in June 2020 was the grotesque lecture at the 2020 virtual annual meeting of the American Society of International He has also published extensively including four books African regional trade agreements as legal regimes, war commerce and international law, the contested empowerment of Kenya's judiciary, and an edited volume the performance of Africa's international courts using litigation for political legal and social change. In those introductions, I'm delighted to turn the floor over to Carmen Gonzales, who will open our discussion with a presentation on why it is crucial to center race when thinking about climate justice. Thank you, Carmen. Thank you, Professor sack and Professor I can go before inviting me, and for inviting me to share this platform with my dear colleague James county. Climate change is one of the most pressing racial justice issues of our time, caused primarily by the greenhouse gas emissions of the world's wealthiest inhabitants. Its impacts are being born disproportionately by the states and peoples who contributed least to the problem. What has been written about the disproportionate impact of climate change on poor and marginalized populations. Very few scholars had examined the racial dimensions of the climate crisis, and its relationship to the fossil fuel driven capitalist world economy. It was occurring at a time of growing economic inequality and rising racial tensions, not only in North America and Europe, but also in China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and many other states. George Floyd in Minneapolis, last May sparked protests, not only in the United States, but globally emphasizing not only solidarity with the black lives movement in the United States, but also content to the global mentions of racial injustice. So let me begin by talking about what I mean by racism. In 1950, an influential publication called the race question was published by UNESCO. And it defined racism as an ideology that involves a belief in the innate and absolute superiority of an arbitrarily defined human group over other equally arbitrarily defined groups. In my presentation, I define racism as human hierarchies based on a variety of factors, most commonly physical characteristics such as skin color, but also ethnicity, indigeneity, language, national origin, religion, culture, immigration status and geographic location. And racialized and the narratives that accompany that racialization vary from time to place, time and place. The narrative is different in China, then in Canada, or in Brazil. Race is embedded in the history of the fossil fuel based world economy, and in the emerging green energy economy. The colonization of the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade established the material and the ideological foundations for the Industrial Revolution, which inaugurated the age of fossil fuels. The Industrial Revolution was made possible by the slave plantations of the Americas located on lands that were stolen from indigenous peoples. We provided the gold and silver that filled European coffers, the cotton for the textile industry, food for the industrial workforce and markets for European manufactured goods. Colonization slavery genocide and the racist ideologies that supported these projects are central, not peripheral to the contemporary fossil fuel based world economy. The slow violence of the fossil fuel industry has a disproportionate impact on racialized and poor communities all over the world from the Niger Delta to the Alberta oil sands to cancer alley in the United States. Third, fossil fuels are concentrated in certain areas of the world, such as the Middle East, that have been targeted over and over for invasion occupation and exploitation. When displaced Muslim and Arab populations, try to seek refuge in Europe or in the United States, they are racialized, classified as potential terrorists and excluded. Fourth, those who are most susceptible to climate related disasters and slow onset events are overwhelmingly persons classified as Don White. They live in areas disproportionately exposed to floods, hurricanes, drought, rising sea levels and desertification. But they have been rendered climate vulnerable through colonialism and its aftermath, including military interventions, Cold War proxy wars between the United States and the Soviet Union, the overthrow of democratically elected regimes, assassinations, predatory lending, onerous austerity measures imposed by the IMF and the World Bank, and disadvantageous economic policies adopted pursuant to bilateral and multilateral trade and investment agreements. These interventions have increased poverty and have deprived countries of the resources needed to adapt to climate change. But racialized communities are also being displaced by the policies designed to address climate change. Wind farms have been constructed on indigenous lands in Oaxaca, Mexico to provide energy to Walmart, Coca-Cola and Heineken. Local communities are not receiving the energy, but they're bearing the loss of land. Similarly, a controversial proposal to build a mega dam in Canada's Peace River threatens to displace indigenous peoples in the name of green energy. The legislation in the US and the European Union requiring the blending of biofuels into transportation fuels has increased global food prices and incentivized the destruction of forest and the expulsion of small farmers from their lands in order to cultivate lucrative biofuel feedstocks. And ironically, some of these biofuels, such as corn-based ethanol and palm oil-based biodiesel, emit more greenhouse gases than the fossil fuels they replace, they are false solutions. Finally, racialized persons displaced by poverty, climate change and conflict for which the US and the European Union bear disproportionate responsibility are being detained, abused, separated from their children, criminally prosecuted, deported, or simply being left to drown at sea. The thread that unites these abuses is racialization and dehumanization, the indifference to the physical and structural violence inflicted on people who reside in war zones, resource extraction zones, ghettos and reservations, refugee camps, and in the extremely climate vulnerable regions and countries of the world. So what does this have to do with international law? International law is not an innocent bystander in the injustices I've described. For centuries, international law protected the rights of slave owners and slave traders. For centuries, international law either ignored or justified genocide in the colonies and settler colonial states as part of Europe's civilizing mission. As the work of Anthony Angie illustrates, international law has been complicit in colonial and post-colonial interventions through a variety of legal doctrines. Aranulias, the doctrine of discovery, the mandate system after World War One, trusteeship after World War Two, modernization, development, preemptive self-defense. These doctrines all depicted non-European peoples as so primitive, uncivilized and underdeveloped that their lives, livelihoods, and cultures were unworthy of protection. However, international law has also been used to encounter hegemonic ways by social movements. Plaintiffs in environmental cases, for example, have harnessed the power of human rights law to achieve victories in national and international tribunals. Climate vulnerable states and peoples have participated in the climate negotiations and have deployed the concept of climate justice to demand accountability from the affluent countries who contributed most to climate change for the adverse impacts that these states and peoples are experiencing. The 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change incorporates an important principle known as the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. This principle imposes an obligation on all states to address climate change, but requires the states that contributed the most to the problem to take the lead in addressing the problem. The Paris Agreement affirms this principle and includes references to climate justice and to human rights and its preamble, but this is where the good news ends. The Paris Agreement does not impose binding emission reduction obligations based on each country's contribution to climate change. Instead, the Paris Agreement allows each state to unilaterally determine the emission reductions it will make. This permits high emitting countries to evade responsibility for their fair share of climate mitigation. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned us that we cannot get above 1.5 degrees over pre-industrial levels if we are to avoid a climate catastrophe. Even if every country complied stringently and strictly with its pledges under the Paris Agreement, we would reach 3 degrees centigrade over pre-industrial levels. But that's not all. The Paris Agreement also fails to incorporate one of the key demands of climate justice movements and especially of the small island states, a moratorium on the extraction of fossil fuels, or at least a phase out of fossil fuel based extraction in affluent countries. Despite the life cycle impacts of fossil fuels on racialized communities and despite their contribution to climate change, the Paris Agreement is silent about the need to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies to restrict the extraction of fossil fuels to curtail fossil fuel driven development. The Paris Agreement also promotes market based approaches to climate change mitigation that legitimate the commodification of nature and the ongoing dispossession of racialized communities. For example, instead of requiring decarbonization of the economy by calling for zero emissions, the agreement calls for a balance between greenhouse gas emissions and removals by sinks, by the second half sinks meaning forests, by the second half or oceans, by the second half of the 21st century. What this does is it creates an incentive to commodify the carbon stored in forests. And this can lead to the expulsion of local and indigenous peoples who rely upon these forests for their survival and for their cultural practices. Indeed, the Paris Agreement explicitly doors these conservation projects through the climate regimes, so called red plus mechanism. Many of these projects are conserving forests by kicking out indigenous peoples interfering with the rights of these communities to harvest plants timber or fish in their ancestral territories. In addition, the Paris Agreement does recognize the importance of adaptation for climate vulnerable states and peoples. It does open the door to approaches that promote procedural justice for marginalized communities by calling for country driven gender responsible participatory and fully transparent adaptation action that takes into account vulnerable groups and communities. Consistent with the principle of common but differentiated responsibility, the Paris Agreement calls on affluent countries to provide financing for both mitigation and adaptation in the global south. The goal was to mobilize 100 billion US dollars per year by the year 2020. The amount actually contributed is less than a tenth of that amount. The amount pledged for 2020 through 2023 is likewise less than a tenth of that amount. That means many mitigation and adaptation projects in the global south are in limbo. I want to conclude by talking about one mechanism of the Paris Agreement that is relatively new and will become increasingly important over time. It's a loss and damage mechanism, and it's designed to address harms that cannot be averted, despite mitigation efforts despite adaptation efforts, both tragedies immediate consequences like hurricanes and floods and slow on study events like rising sea levels and desertification. Including this provision in the Paris Agreement was on its face a big win for the small island states that are facing imminent loss of their territory and that have been pushing aggressively for this. But this acceptance came with a condition, the decision adopting the Paris Agreement specifies that the loss and damage mechanism does not provide any basis for liability and compensation. It's also clear how any assistance provided through this mechanism will be financed to date high emitting affluent countries have proposed insurance schemes to finance loss and damage. It reinforces climate injustice by requiring climate vulnerable states and peoples to pay hefty insurance premiums to cover future losses. Instead of requiring the affluent states and corporations that cause the problem to at least subsidize these premiums if not pay them outright. There are alternative approaches for financing loss and damage. Legal scholars have proposed carbon taxes levies on fossil fuel companies contributions from high emitting states and proceeds from carbon trading. These proposals have fallen on deaf ears. Instead, at every turn climate change has become another profit making opportunity to do insurance based financial tools through carbon markets through the commodification commodification of forest through biofuels. And as the climate crisis gets worse geoengineering of the climate by injecting aerosol particles into the stratosphere will definitely be on the table. Even though this will disrupt food production in much of the global south by interfering with photosynthesis climate change exacerbates and intensifies existing patterns of injustice. It inflicts disproportionate harm on those who were on the receiving end of colonialism, the losing end of globalization and who benefited little from the fossil fuel based global economy, but suffered its worst impacts, including war, poverty, pollution and dispossession. Racism makes injustice morally acceptable. It produces indifference to the plight of large segments of the world's population and constructs them as expendable and disposable. Right wing authoritarian leaders and movements have weaponized racism in order to create cross class alliances in support of policies that exacerbate climate change, increase economic precarity and swell the ranks of the dispossessed. Racism creates the illusion that persons classified as white are somehow immune to the dangers that disproportionately affect racialized communities, whether that danger is coded or climate change. Studies have shown that most people in the US who identify as white, even if they believe that climate change is real, don't think that they will be personally affected. Even though millions are currently facing powder outages and water shutoffs provoked by unprecedented winter storms that were caused at least in part by the rapid heating of the Arctic, pushing frigid air from the north to the south. Racialized communities are the canaries in the coal mine. They are the first to suffer the ravages of climate change, but their plight is a harbinger of the harm that will be fought everyone. Racism creates divisions between groups of people whose vulnerability to climate change should serve as the basis for solidarity. As economic inequality increases, and the planet's ecosystems are brought to the brink of collapse, all but the very affluent will become frontline communities in an increasingly dangerous and damaged world. A race conscious analysis of climate change has the potential to build solidarity among social movements that demand economic justice, environmental justice, racial justice. I close with the words of Naomi Klein. The anti-austerity people rarely talk about climate change. The climate change people rarely talk about war or occupation. We rarely make the connection between the guns that take black lives on the streets of US cities and in police custody, and the much larger forces that annihilate so many black lives on arid land and in precarious boats around the world. As climate change intensifies, building broad-based social movements is essential to our collective survival. Climate change need not be a tragedy. It's also an opportunity. Thank you. Thank you very much, Carmen, for these fantastic and insightful remarks. It's time to press to turn to our second speaker, James Gotti, who I believe, yes, there's James on my, on my view, I had lost you, James, so I apologize. Now we turn to James Gotti, who's agreed to share insights into the relationship between race, indigeneity and international economic law as a starting point. Over to you, James. So thank you. Thank you very much, Professor Sarasek, for this invitation and the kind introduction. I admire very much the work you're doing there in business law, in human rights, in environmental law, in climate justice, in private international law. In fact, you have a wonderful faculty there with that friend of mine, Professor Alderbeci. It's great to be here with you and with my great and terrific colleague, Professor Carmen Gonzalez, who is a really hard act to follow. So you asked me to talk about the relationship between race and international law, including international economic law. And I'll say a few words about that. I think that Professor Carmen Gonzalez has already spoken quite extensively about this, in particular in the international environmental law area. So let me begin with some thoughts on the public international law side before saying a few words on the international economic law front. There's an increasing new literature now grappling with this question of race and international law and this has a reason particularly with the interest in international legal history that third world approaches to international law scholars have been writing about now for just over two decades. And in this literature, these scholars have been showing how European international law mobilized racial difference in the colonial project of enslavement, expropriation of man from non European peoples, and justified their political domination very much along the lines that Professor Carmen Gonzalez already spoke about. So third world approaches to international law scholars and practitioners as well as critical race theorists and practitioners trace the ways in which the marginalization and domination of peoples of color. The third world peoples are such a friend and articulated in their very liberatory goals of international law, sovereign equality, self determination rights development equality. And really great overlap really between all the things that Professor Carmen Gonzalez spoke about and, and what I'll be emphasizing. This group of scholars have been emphasizing how this liberatory goals coexist alongside economic hierarchy and subordination between nations and peoples, and therefore carrying forward the legacies of colonial conquest and European white imperialism. There's a very complicated legacies of what Boopinda Chimney calls the transnational capitalist elites in the global south who collaborate and are in business with the elites and from the global north. And Professor Carmen Gonzalez has meant has mentioned, you know, one of the most important points of beginning in this work in the last two and a half decades, Anthony Angi's book imperialism sovereignty and the making of international law. And in this book and his other work Professor Angi has traced how sovereignty was used in the history of international law as a mechanism of exclusion of non European peoples from the realm of sovereignty and power. This he argues is possible because at the center of this analytical framework, which he calls the dynamic of difference between civilized European and uncivilized and barbaric non European peoples. The central question that international lawyers from natural law, natural law scholars to positivist jurists were asking was how to reconcile the sort of dynamic of difference between the non European and the European world. And in so doing, Angi and other third world scholars have shown how this Ali international law publicists and jurists like Victoria justified the right of European states to hospitality and therefore to engage in trade with non Europeans. And when this non European peoples rejected the overtures international law rules they argue justified the invocation of war and conquest over these non European peoples to repair the failure to respect those rights. So those Ali natural law prerogatives of European states and traders were then embedded in treaties including those on capitulations and transport territory to European states in the positivist errors in the 19th and 20th centuries. Anthony Angi and 12 scholars argue that those vestiges of colonial prerogatives continue to date. They were carried forward, for example, in the 20th century in the League of Nations mandate system. And the trusteeship system of the United Nations. After the second world war, other scholars like Mohammed Shah of the dean have further complicated this retelling of the history of international law, emphasizing the variety of European colonialism for example, contrasting the French liberal variety that presuppose the need to manipulate African colonial subjects as a pathway to civilizing them and that of German ethno nationalism that was based on the suppression of the races and of the German and racial supremacy of non European peoples. Now there's been much less progress made in tracing the relevance of race in international economic law. In other words, race and racism have not been really a central analytical category for understanding international economic law and this is not to suggest that the situation is much better in public international law. In fact, I would argue that, although a lot of work has been done in sort of the 12 critical race theory tradition in public international law, that's a marginal tradition in public international law as well. If you imagine in public international law, then it's almost nonexistent in international economic law. So international economic law scholars therefore have a lot to learn, not just from public international law that is in its infancy on these issues, but also from disciplines like political theory, international relations where there has been a much more sustained exploration of the ways in which discourses about race constitute social relations and lay a foundation for racialized systems of exploitation. So for international relations scholars, for example, there's been a marked sort of trend in tracing how racial capitalism marks historical intimacy among slave trade, enslavement and colonialism that often goes unacknowledged, but also captures the very epitomized racialized system of valuation and extraction that continues to this day. And in many ways without going too much detail there are many similarities and overlaps between what Professor Kamen Gonzalez has been doing and spoke about quite eloquently today already in the international environmental law area. In international economic law, for the most part, the scholarship there has remained primarily preoccupied with highly abstract but black letter law questions that obscure the role of race and racism. In fact, I would argue and I will illustrate this with a couple of examples, race and racism have often been conceptualized as political matters that fall outside of the four corners of international economic law in fact of the global political economy. And this is a really telling silence, not just because of the work that's been done, you know, for example said with Robinson's work black Marxism they're making of the black radical tradition. And also because as I've learned from my friend Tina Tsovala, the idea of racial capitalism was first developed by radical opponents of apartheid in South Africa. And she's introduced me to this sort of wonderful article written in 1976 by Martin Legasek and David Hemsson called for an investment and the reproduction of racial capitalism in South Africa and you haven't read it I really encourage you to take a look at it. In other words, the concept of racial capitalism was developed in direct relation to the subject matter of international economic law in the context of apartheid South Africa. One of the efforts to close this gap is a special issue of the general of international economic law that I'll be co-editing with Tina Tsovala, exploring the concept of racial capitalism, what the concept of racial capitalism can can do in shedding light in international economic law, but also whether knowledge of contemporary international economic law can help us to refine and update the concept of racial capitalism. So let me give you a few other ways in which I think international economic law has silenced questions about the very important question of race. We've got the post-Second World War two institutions, the two Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, both of them have what is known as a non-political clause. They were not supposed to interfere in any matters of commerce or economics that was left entirely to the United Nations, the United Nations was the body that was going to deal with all matters political. In 1969, the General Council of the World Bank walked into the United Nations General Assembly in New York to justify why the World Bank could not stop lending to South Africa, apartheid South Africa. This is 1969, or to Portugal, which was continuing its policy of apartheid in Africa. Because according to the World Bank General Council in 1969, questions of race and racial discrimination were political questions that did not matter in the work of the World Bank. That's a whole episode that many of us, twillers have been writing about. And I think which we should all be remembering in tracing the reluctance of international economic law to deal with questions of race. It's not just the Bretton Woods institutions, gut as well, the general agreement of tariffs and trade. In the 1940s, gut members agreed that they would not discuss what they termed explicitly political questions. There was actually a clause in article 38 paragraph three of the Havana Charter, which provided this is the non-political clause. Members recognized that the organization should not attempt to take action, which would involve passing judgment in any way on essentially political matters. Accordingly, and in order to avoid conflict of responsibility between the UN, the political guys, the bad guys, we are the good guys dealing with economic matters. With respect to such matters, any measure taken by a member directly in connection with the political matter brought before the United Nations in accordance with chapters four and six of the Charter of the United Nations shall be deemed to fall within the scope of the United Nations, and shall not be subject to the provisions of this Charter. So trade had nothing to do with political matters. This is 1940. This is the height of European colonial rule in Africa and in Asia and elsewhere. And this is the agreement arrived at by the white nations of the north that they will not deal with any matters political. And this in my view has a direct link with the 1969 episode where the general council of the World Bank goes to the United Nations General Assembly to say that the World Bank and I have nothing to do with questions of racial discrimination or colonialism in Africa. Now, think also of another clause in God. This is what I call the colonial clause. This is article 26 paragraph five. It reads paragraph five a each government. It's still there. So if you have your gut, you can open up you can Google this article 26 five a each government accepting this agreement does so in respect of its metropolitan territory and of the other territories for which it has international responsibility. This clause enabled the United Kingdom as a colonial power therefore to decide to apply the gut obligations to its colonies or not. For example, the United Kingdom gave notice on behalf of Newfoundland the monitor territory of Palestine or the territories of that it was responsible for, except Jamaica. And this is an interesting story that is a subject of my book which I'm writing on recent international law. So more on that later on. In any event, what this clause shows us is that our current system of international economic law still embeds within it. These notions that were based on explicitly racist foundations that exist to date. So this is not something that happened. So in the past, as, as, as one of my professors as a graduate student when I came to study in the United States told me, you know, colonialism something that happened in the past you know anything that happens from now, you know from, you know, the end of colonial rule. The post colonial governments are entirely responsible. And we shouldn't be going back to the past, you know, this is the brave moment of the post Cold War wild in which, you know, it was supposed to be the sort of end of history with markets and and and sort of small state as sort of the future of the world. In any event, I can give many examples including the generalized system of preferences and the way in which it continued the colonial patterns of trade, giving the former colonists privilege to access the markets of the West. And this has been sort of subject to lots of litigation in the world trade organization. What I would argue is that this litigation has simply reorganized the racially produced differentiations of colonial rule but not eliminate them in any, in any way. And the final example I want to give is the example of neoliberal economic policies, which also my colleague come in Gonzales has spoken about the justifications of neoliberal economic programs which includes support for free trade. And the rest of the mantra of the neoliberal agenda are in a very large part based on on underlying assumptions and stated disparaging and therefore implicitly racist stereotypes, particularly of the African states and of African leaders and the people of the African. I want to say that these leaders are blameless. In any event, I think here I would channel Professor Bukinda Chimney's persuasion persuading persuasive argument about sort of thinking about the transnational capitalist class as I said in any event, the good, the good governance agenda that sort of presented as a counterpoint to the chaos. And the turmoil of African states invokes pretty racist imagery if you think about it. This was the subject of my doctoral thesis. This was the subject of my doctoral thesis. This negative images that have been projected about the African state and that in turn justify the continuation of neoliberal economic policies. And the prescriptions of the Bretton Woods institutions are in my view based on explicitly racist notions that continue a long legacy in international economic law of how the globe is governed in terms of the white and non white races. This is not to say that I'm sort of posing this juxtaposition of African innocent and of it authenticity on the one hand and white guilt or Western guilt on the other. But I think it's very important to investigate some of the stereotypes and the manner in which they have emerged as markers of deficit, very much the same way that the colonial project justified colonial rules slavery and the rest of it. So thank you very much for the opportunity to be part of this conversation. Thank you very much, Professor James Gotti for those very insightful remarks. I'd like to now turn back to Professor Carmen Gonzalez with a follow up question building on what we have just just learned. And I think it's very interesting, reflecting back on the history of international law and the silences and embedding of silences with regard to race but also embedding of racism within structures. And now to turn to thinking about our current international system and the climate regime as perhaps a starting point. So, you have illustrated very well the climate justice and race dimensions and I guess my question is this. The international agreements within the UN climate regime, the UNFCCC the Paris Agreement are generally thought of as the key tools that have been adopted by the international community to address climate change. My, my inclination. Following your earlier remarks is is to think that these agreements do not reflect climate justice and my question is, do you think they could be reformed to do so, or must the quest for climate justice come from outside the regime the climate regime. Thank you for that. Excellent. Excellent question. I think it's really that we need to do both. We need to work within the climate regime and, and reform it, and we need to work outside of the climate regime is not one or the other. So first of all, there are provisions within the climate regime that are useful from a climate justice perspective. First and foremost is the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. It enables climate vulnerable states and peoples to press high emitting states to take responsibility for climate change commensurate with their contribution to the problem. This principle was reaffirmed in the Paris Agreement, although it was also weakened in the Paris Agreement. The second climate justice friendly provision in the Paris Agreement is not in the substance of the agreement but in the preamble. The Paris Agreement is the first environmental treaty that recognizes the human rights obligations of states and their duty to comply with these obligations when taking action to combat climate change. This I take as an invitation to embed human rights frameworks into the guidelines for the implementation of the Paris Agreement, and to make sure that these guidelines are enforceable through some sort of oversight or complaint mechanism. So as to avoid the very types of human rights abuses that we have seen in green energy projects. First importantly, the insertion of the loss and damage provision as compromised as it is right I discussed previously the decision adopting the Paris Agreement that says this provision shall not serve as the basis of compensation and liability. Thus the fact that it is now in the Paris Agreement can change the political narrative on climate change from an abstract North South conflict from a focus on mitigation only to a focus on the obligations of the international community to those who are on the front lines of climate change. Human rights emphasis on procedural justice on participation and inclusion can empower vulnerable communities. If we develop the loss and damage mechanism appropriately to speak for themselves, thereby starting to erode the purely state centric framework of this agreement. But this is still a heavy lift. As one of the questions in the chat asked, why are NGOs not talking about this language. The focus up to now has been on mitigation only recently adaptation and not at all on loss and damage and how this is happening right now and is only going to get worse. The Paris Agreement gives and takes it takes away the ability to address address compensation and liability, but it doesn't take away the ability to address responsibility to create a fund into which countries are expected to contribute, or if the parties so agree required to contribute on the basis of their responsibility not liability responsibility. So there's some room and we have to take advantage of every single inch of space that exists in that agreement. Do we need to go outside of the climate regime. Absolutely. It boggles the mind that climate change is relegated to a silo a specialized treaty managed by environmental law experts who are highly technocratic by accident or by design. The climate regime has tinkered on the margins of an unsustainable and profoundly inequitable and racialized world economy. The root cause of climate change and many other environmental problems is an international economic order that is premised on a physical and possibility unlimited economic growth on a finite planet that treats nature as an inert object. That treats the majority of as bendable and disposable. Most of international law, especially trade law investment law and finance proceeds as if the climate emergency didn't exist. Why has the WTO not taken more steps to address climate change. Why have the enormous fossil fuel subsidies not been challenged when the relatively meager subsidies to support renewable energy have been repeatedly subjected to WTO challenge. We need to deploy every legal tool available to transform the dominant economic paradigm before it's too late. So one of the questions this raises is, where can we turn for alternative conceptions of how we might relate to the natural world and to one another. Who are our allies. What is the theory of change environmental movements have emerged in poor and affluent countries fighting for climate justice food justice energy justice water justice justice for indigenous peoples. The struggles are intersectional. They reveal the cumulative impacts of multiple forms of subordination, the interdependent and mutually reinforcing nature of economic environmental racial and gender injustices. These movements are also at the forefront of the struggles against the fossil fuel industry. We need to use every available body of law, including human rights law to empower these frontline communities and to build coalitions and alliances so that we can build power. Thank you very much for those words. I would now pose a follow up question for Professor James Gotti. Going back to reflections from economic law. So, a dominant international framework that we see now for a sustainable and inclusive global economy is that of sustainable development and more precisely these days the 2030 sustainable development goals. I know that in some of your writings you've suggested that it's important to adopt what you described as a post development approach, and also suggested that this matters for climate justice. I'm wondering if you could share with us what you mean by that. Thank you, Professor sector that question. And, you know, first of all, I agree with a comment very much. I think there's a big overlap between what she said and what I might say in response to this. A post development approach provides a framework for discussing climate change that emphasizes how contemporary development paradigms are designed by elites and global institutions they control from above as opposed to from below very much along the lines that I think Gonzales was talking about all these movements that have a reason to protest all these projects that are very harmful for them and their livelihoods. The claim here for post development is that ideas about development. I'm thinking to account the knowledge, the interests, the livelihoods, the views of ordinary peoples and communities. And a good example of this for example is that after the unfortunate fires in Australia several months ago. The Australian government issued a report saying, oh, we should have taken into account how the indigenous peoples have dealt with this question of forest fires perhaps we might have dealt with is much differently perhaps much better. There are many examples like this where we take much too seriously expert so called expert knowledges and ignore knowledges that have existed for millennia that might be very useful for addressing some of the current crisis that we are talking about. So a post development concept would sort of argue that it's not based on notions of free markets or global modernity or of carbon capitalism as Professor Gonzales was saying, or as many critics of international law I wonder why we are called critics but in any event. Critics of the eccentric international and social order sort of argue that these rules and these policies of development including sustainable development goals otherwise very good sounding ideas themselves are problematic because they failed to take seriously local histories and politics. And I don't mean local politics and histories in a romantic or unrealistic manner, but rather as foundations for alternative and dissenting imagination so this is really what lacks in a lot of these discussions. So, you know, Bill gets come up comes up with a new book on climate change, and he's all the rage that's what sort of sort of occupying lots of people in sort of the climate circles. But there are many other ways we might think about this problem from different perspectives and you have nothing against against him. I think it's really important to sort of not just break down the silos. Think about the kind of important work that's sort of been done by, by some of the leading anthropologists that have been looking at these questions from the bottom up listening to people movements to the concerns of the underprivileged to the farmers who are protesting protesting in India, they know something that that the concepts of global elites and imperial globality don't capture quite well. So the bottom line I guess is that a post development approach counters this universe, universalizing solutions to issues like climate justice and programs, non dominant perspectives that cannot be reduced to this modernity coloniality paradigm that has an overbearing sort of influence in how we think about these issues. The work of Balakrishnan Rajagopal is really important in this respects and he sort of in part talks about how, even though human rights discourse is really important, it may be part of this hegemonic global, coloniality modernity paradigm that is problematic. And that, well, we should not dismiss human rights, because it might provide some of the imagination for this radical democratic alternatives, which are really critical that we, we ought to take more seriously this knowledge is that exists within our grasp, and which are there but which don't have the privileged positions that elite, lots of elite discourses, economics and law, mainstream law, especially in international law, international economic or international environmental law have. And I completely agree with comment about the importance of forming tactical alliances between many groups that share common objectives that promote alternative, and perhaps radical imaginations about how to think about these problems of, of climate justice in a way that centers issues of identity and race and gender and indigeneity. So, I guess that is my attempt at answering your question about what this post development paradigm really means. Thank you very much to both of you. In light of the time while I do have some further questions I could pose to you I think this is perhaps a good time to turn things over to my co host, BC, who will be sharing some questions from the chat. So over to you BC. Thanks a lot, Sarah and thanks a lot to our guests as well as participants. As Professor Gonzalez and Professor Kathy would have seen there are a couple of questions. Now, in the pipeline. So the proposal is, Professor coming probably goes for the first one from Steve. And then we can come back to the one which is post both of you from Professor David van this way. And then we'll come back again to the most specific one to Professor Gonzalez and then to, to the more general one, if that's okay. So, thank you very much to our participants again we're trying to keep this to tonight in it so so we do appreciate that you're here with us over to you Professor Gonzalez. Okay, so Steve's question is to what extent is international law protect indigenous residents in the Amazon basin. And there's a leading human rights treaty I low convention 169 and also the United Nations declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples. And they provides for self determination. And then we'll come back to the question of ancestral lands, etc. Should there be any constraints on their rights to clear cut their lands and sell those rights to timber companies, despite the clear harm to the climate. For me this is a very hypothetical question because what's happening right now in the Amazon basin is that the boss on our regime is waging a genocidal war against indigenous peoples in order to take their land, so that the boss on our regime can sell this land to timber We're sort of, you know, getting our wheels twisted here in terms of the real threat to the Amazon basin right now and who is posing that threat to the Amazon basin. Right now, it is in fact the human rights treaties that protect the rights of indigenous peoples that are standing between disaster that the boss on our wants to inflict and the resistance of indigenous peoples. So consistent with the international law on the rights of indigenous people self determination is front and central in terms of the demands of people who have been dispossessed, who since time immemorial have existed as as a coherent community. And I fully support that right. That means that in certain instances I may not agree with the choices they make. And I understand that sometimes communities are so pressed to the margins that they make choices that may be at odds with their fundamental values. The solution lies not in policing them and jailing them and expelling them and restricting them, but in creating the conditions that are possible for these communities to have a decent life and not have to harm the environment in order to survive. Thank you very much, Professor Gonzalez. So again, we're trying to keep this as conversational as possible so if Professor Kathy has any thing to add to that that would be great. Otherwise, I'll at the same time pose the question from from David, so that you can then take it together and ask, might it follow the aspect of racism in international law, if scientific risk assess for taking regulatory action to control pesticides and trade and persistent organic pollutants. Yeah, so thanks for that question. So first of all, I think, let me frame it the way I understand it. In the EU, for African countries to be able to export certain agricultural products, there are certain requirements, such as the maximum residue levels for flowers, or there are requirements for things, especially agricultural products to be exported to the European Union, but also to the United States, not to have used things like pesticides that are banned like, let me call it by the name called in Kenya in Africa DDT. I think, first of all, I think as a general matter, there's nothing wrong with the types of questions that are regulated in international trade for purposes of health. So that's, let's just sort of, you know, say that that's, that's my premise, my premise is that there's really nothing inherently wrong with that I think the problem with some of this regulatory regimes for testing or for the European Union or the United States is that certain markets to let products from the developing countries into their own markets is that is that well those chemicals are banned for use in the EU. They are not banned for use in developing countries. That is where I would say the racism is because those products often of major multinational corporations that cannot be used in certain markets in the world, and which are exported to markets from Europe from the United States, although they are banned in those countries, or they are produced by multinationals that I had quoted in the places where those chemicals are banned I think that is the racism there. And then the then the regulatory authorities in Europe or North America find it necessary to have to regulate the entry of any products that infected with those pesticides or those banned pollutants. I think that is where we see the sort of another weakness of international economic law in that, in that the binding nature of its rules don't always work in an even manner. It works much more beneficially to the benefit of the markets of the global north, but not sort of in the interest of the markets of the global south. And that's why the markets of the global north are regulating those pesticides much more stringently. Now, I think that, you know, the other point I just wanted to add here is that these are certainly I mean there are many other questions about which some of which I've written about the intersect with questions of intellectual property rights in the context for example of GMO maze and the ban that African countries like Zambia Zimbabwe several years ago imposed on those. You know, I think that's another way of thinking about this question sort of flipping it on its head. In some context that African governments, you know, have been sort of in effect invoking the precautionary principle without much information about what the potential impact of this, these types of food products might be on their populations. This has been pushing very hard for those types of product to be available because of hunger and things like that. And I think that there are ways in which a lot of this discourses in the way it's applied unevenly between the global north and global south, sort of have racist undertones. But I don't overstep the point perhaps Professor coming Gonzalez has something to add to that. You can spend this question around in so many different ways I was reading it and thinking now what what did the author intend was this the question or was it something somewhat different. But taking off from where you ended James, using genetically modified organisms as an example, the quantification obligations that are imposed before country can ban a particular article are utterly burdensome on the states and individuals of the global south who may not have the resources to do this work and may have other priorities in terms of limited state resources. So essentially it's a free pass for dangerous chemicals to enter the global south or dangerous products to enter the global south or products that are undesired to enter the global south, because it erects an additional barrier. It also creates a cult of expertise, it takes expert knowledge to do the risk assessment. In many places the risk assessment is then followed by a cost benefit analysis and before you know it. The voices of those who are affected are utterly drowned out they don't have a voice, they can't come forward. People did in Flint Michigan with their contaminated bottles of water with their dirty water and say look do you want to drink this because of course they're not scientists they don't know any better. So we see this type of bias against popular epidemiology in the countries of the global north against racialized populations Flint Michigan being a phenomenal example. It wasn't until a medical doctor did tests of children and discovered elevated levels of lead in their blood that regulators actually started to take some action in Flint. We see a similar type of scenario in terms of what happens in the states of the global south and the regulatory burdens that are imposed on them before they can take regulatory action. And again the WTO agreements are central here the WTO SPS agreement. Thank you very much to our guests for those responses. I should add that Professor Wander's work is a colleague here. He posed that question. He's a candidate research and law. So just put that that is the associate director of the marina and environmental law Institute so thank you very much for that. Now, if I could exercise a bit of moderators discretion here and pull together some questions for guests today. Professor Gonzalez they're coupled from you in terms of order Adrian's question will be next. But I think Professor adibola who is who I know is questions sort of dovetails this conversation. So I wonder if you wanted to take it at all I'll read it out that short, and then I'll try to paraphrase Adrian's question. So the last question is how does gas emissions through climate justice lens, how would you envision food security and food sovereignty to meet the food needs of the growing populations, estimated to be able to get to 250, 250. So that's how in question. Then Adrian's, which he situates in the context of the Paris climate, Paris Agreement and article eight that you had mentioned, you know really comes down to his, he's wondering I guess a lot here. this is connected to racism and how can we argue so? I don't know how I know we'll come to the other questions that we have outstanding. Okay, let me begin with a food question. I've written extensively on the question of food security, food sovereignty, food justice, and there's been a tremendous amount of excellent work done on this subject by President and former special rapporteurs on the right to food. The consensus of all of them, and it's not a new consensus, this goes back to the work of Amartya Sen on poverty and famines decades ago, is that food insecurity is a function of poverty, not a food distribution. We have more than enough food to feed the planet two times over, but the wealthy dominate that food and the poor go without. Part of the reason the poor go without is because they have been deprived of the lands and the resources necessary to grow their food, so that this land can be used to produce biofuels, to produce products that are exported, everything from cut flowers to cotton to coffee to cocoa, using industrial agricultural methods that produce enormous greenhouse gas emissions. Scientific study after scientific study has said if you provide people with the resources that they need to actually grow food instead of cut flowers, not only will you reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but you will also address the chronic problem of hunger and food insecurity. There's an entire movement, La Via Campesina is one of the key organizations, it's a movement of farmers all over the world who are demanding the right to use methods of cultivation that do not harm the environment, to exercise control over their land, to be able to exercise local and national control over food policy, instead of having that be dictated by trade agreements. So there's a very simple solution to this to this conundrum, but trade law is an obstacle. What trade law does is to create uneven rules where affluent countries like the United States subsidize agriculture to the tune of billions of dollars, and then through these agreements require countries in the global south to lower their tariffs. What happens when you lower tariffs and you ship subsidized food, the local farmers are thrown off the land. So local farmers are being thrown off the land by trade policy. Local farmers are being thrown off the land because the cultivation of biofuels is now so root-critic that why would you grow food? Just kick off the local farmers and throw them off. There's a phenomenon called land grabbing, where foreign investors come into a country and in a very non-transparent manner get a 100-year lease or do an outright purchase of land for the purpose of cultivating some export crop. All of the product is exported, nothing goes to the local people, the water is contaminated by the pesticides, the greenhouse gashins, gases increase, and often the water sources are depleted. So this is again a manifestation of complete and utter contempt for small farmers and indigenous peoples all over the world who do have very powerful agricultural knowledge and could cultivate the food that they need in a way that does not destroy the planet. But we respect the scientific experts instead of working collaboratively with the communities that have this knowledge and combining modern scientific innovations with traditional knowledge. This goes back to James's point about marginalizing other ways of thinking about our relationship to the natural world and to each other and reinforcing this monoculture, truly a monoculture, one idea of what agriculture should look like. Adrienne's question about racism and this language in the Paris Agreement that excludes compensation and liability, this was put in by the United States. The United States' position and remember this was the Obama administration so it's not, this isn't something the Trump administration added, was we're not taking responsibility for this and this is deeply, deeply problematic and I think Adrienne is correct to say why aren't NGOs seizing upon this? This is the justice question in the climate regime. Loss and damage is already producing migration. When you look at the Central Americans who are coming to the United States, they're escaping poverty caused by many of the policies of the United States, conflict caused by U.S. support for 30-year civil wars and massive droughts, unprecedented droughts and most recently two back-to-back hurricanes. They're a product of climate change. Why isn't the justice front and center? Why isn't this part of the narrative? And I do think that one of the ways that racism operates is that it blinds us to the plight of others in the world and enables us to continue to view environmental law generally and the Paris Agreement specifically in highly technocratic terms that favor expert knowledge and drown out the voices of people who are suffering. Thank you very much Professor Gonzalez and we're very conscious of time here so just one more question that I wanted to come in on on that otherwise I'll pose this question to Professor Gonzalez. It's one from Nicole. She has ads following up on your comments about the need to adopt a post-capitalism economy as the international law tools that can be leveraged to press further the growth of overdeveloped or over-conceptive states. And I believe that that's the last question we have in the chat box but at this point it's open to both you and Professor Gatti really to take this one and the other either way. And I'll be very brief because as Professor Gatti who really needs to answer this question. So first of all I want to express my disappointment with environmental law. There is no treaty that says we need less growth. How can there possibly not be an environmental treaty that recognizes the obvious, that we're exceeding ecological limits, that we cannot pursue growth at any cost, that this is irrational. The sustainable development goals, the blueprint for now to 2030 is premised on unlimited economic growth. We're living in a fantasy world. So first of all if environmental law were not captured by elites, which it is, we would be acknowledging this fundamental reality which anyone who cares about environmental issues understands. That should be the beginning. Instead of tinkering on the margins it should be challenging the mainstream paradigm but it's not. I'll let Professor Gatti answer about economic law. Well I don't know if I have anything useful to add. I would recommend everybody to read Professor Kamen González's work on how Latin American states have adopted the Chinese model of sort of, let me just call it in my own words, sort of neoliberal economics. And I would, you know, when I read it I told her that what she wrote about this developmental model from China, I may not be calling it exactly what she called it, it was very true. It's sort of rang a bell for me for what's happening in African countries. This fascination, for example, with infrastructure led development, that, you know, there are many things I can say about this but the most important, the two most important being one that it takes away the attention of the government from spending on basic needs on education, on health, on all the types of issues that we're talking about including meeting basic needs like food and shelter. Second is debt that a lot of this infrastructure led growth that many African governments and many governments in Latin America are pursuing are being pursued with a huge indebtedness of accumulation of debt. That means that if you look at the proportion of the national budgets of these countries that they are now at the moment as we speak preparing to present to the parliaments for the next financial year, a huge proportion is to repay the debt to for debt servicing, not even to repay, it's for debt servicing. And if you then think of what Professor Kamen Gonzales said about how the climate catastrophe has become a profit making opportunity, you find that a lot of western interests, the International Finance Institute based in Washington DC, that sort of the the global body of these banks that are giving loans and bonds to developing country governments are beginning to call some of those bonds as green bonds or sort of naming them in a way that sort of is is going to look like it's going to help with climate change or that is going to help with the sustainable development goals. If you actually look at some of those institutions, they're leading people on on sort of their public side are people who who have impeccable credentials on sustainable development goals on on green development. And some people have called this greenwashing, you know, so I think we shouldn't really lose focus that that although we do want alternatives, that a lot of the money that is driving the discourses, the debates, is coming from a different place. And that that what I hear Professor Kamen Gonzales to be saying, and why I think what I've been trying to say in parroting what she's saying is that is that this marginal discourses are unfortunately, the banks sort of ignored and not being taken seriously because they're not regarded as as expert knowledges. And yet we know that like a report I think out just today from from Yale and some other places shows again another example of how climate change is another opportunity for profit making in this context, that there's now evidence of countries and corporations making deals land grab deals. Because to answer again Professor Tilaou's question, that there's this new demand for food because of a COVID-19 pandemic that is going to justify rather than reverse what we've been talking about. So I think it's really important to have this rainbow imaginations to think outside the box to really push within our disciplines, because there's a lot of a lot of resources are being poured to retrench the current paradigms that are not working. The final thing I just want to say is in response to one of the earlier questions regarding food is that we shouldn't forget another of the really perverse ways in which global trade and investment regimes work, which is that the rich countries, when they, for example, raise their alum and ship or whatever, they ship off the 40 mits to the poor countries like in the South Pacific, where you see evidence of lifestyle diseases, where if you're in a hotel you're seated right across a very organic food market, but they're serving tinned fruits and tinned beans from New Zealand and from Australia. Because the trade agreements have made those much cheaper than the organic food and the organic fruit that those people are growing. It's really paradoxical. These are really the questions not just relating to climate change and climate justice, but to global economic justice that unfortunately are not the subject matter, even of the leading journals including the Journal of International Economic Law or the American Journal of International Economic Law. I'm associated with those journals and that we should overturn those paradigms that sort of are driving those discourses and have these alternative ideas to be really the mainstream and not the marginal or the critical, but the mainstream because that's what really matters. So I'll shut up if I get into more trouble. No, thank you. Thank you very much to you Professor Gafi and to Professor Gonzales. Yes, we have noted time and again thank you very much to everyone who stayed with us up to now. We have one of our colleagues and I had just reached out to my colleague Professor Sek as well. She is Professor Sherry Pigtu. I'm asking you to unmute now Professor Pigtu and you can come in for what we hope is not longer than three to four minutes please and then it will be over to Professor Sek then for the intervention. Okay, I'm unmuted but it won't let me unmute my video which might be a good thing because I'm sitting here in my sweatshirt and so forth. I'm very very interested and so happy that I've joined this. I'm an indigenous person from here right from good old Nova Scotia but as Sarah introduced on Miigamagi territory and I'm interested into this multiple scale your the way that I guess development models are imposed in multi-scalier ways if you will from within borders to national borders and I see a lot of correlation to what countries struggle with to what indigenous people struggle with within their borders. For example, we have this really mega neoliberal paradigm being forced on indigenous populations as a form of governance to our detriment. We have a lot of contestation against pipelines and so forth within the country and I am also experiencing on the international level to what Carmen was talking about. I thought was so profound. I try to take notes and I realize this is being recorded about the the fundamental premise of the SDGs and if you have any literature or written about that I would appreciate it so much and you too James you had mentioned referenced a lot of scholars and I'm going to be approaching BC to come up with well what were some of those references because I really appreciated the the tracing of the history of what's happened in these these countries and how the World Bank and how these international organizations sort of you know pushed away any responsibility so I've seen a lot of correlations and I really appreciate it very much and I'm so happy that I joined because I've I've struggled on the international level for small scale fishing rights for some time and and just seeing how the states had has reacted and particularly the the elites that this whole neoliberal paradigm creates that put leaders at odds with their own people and I find that happens in the indigenous communities there's something else I wanted to say but that's it thank you so much and I'm so honored to have been a part to witness these very insightful remarks and you make me feel good you give me confidence that I'm not imagining these things and so I it was very much support and I'll be looking to your work thank you will allow you thank you very much Sherry for sharing those reflections as well on that note given we are out of time I want to thank our special guests I want to thank my colleagues also for supporting BC and I in inviting our wonderful guests and for this this these insightful remarks and I think inspirational remarks it's a lot of food for thought for all of us and I also want to thank all of those who were able to tune in for this session and to stay for as long as they were able to I know there were some people from different time zones who logged off a little bit early this is recorded and so we will be posting this on our website and also on the I think Schulich School of Law YouTube channel so we'll keep you posted with that and I believe that's it thank you BC thank you everybody and have a wonderful rest of the day or evening wherever you may happen to be so thank you take care thanks a lot thank you very much