 So two weeks ago, in our first seminar, Climate Change and Politics, Larry Lohman discussed the ways in which the politics of climate change have been framed in ways that really accommodate Western points of views, but largely neglect the ways in which climate issues relate to the livelihoods of communities in other parts of the world. Last week, in the Climate Change and Development Seminar, Dr. Andrew Neucham discussed climate change in relation to globalization and in relation to how it's becoming increasingly crucial to address the discrepancy between the impact on those responsible for climate change and those least responsible, but most affected by it. Tonight, in this Climate Change and Law Seminar, our objective is to attempt to understand how climate issues are addressed through legal frameworks and how, especially environmental justice is undermined by many of the current initiatives in mainstream climate discourse. This talk will be 45 minutes, and it will be followed by a session of questions, answers, and discussions in which we hope that many of you will participate. If you want to tweet about the seminars, please use the hashtag climateperspectives. And now, it is my honor to present to you our speaker for this seminar, Dr. Faya Lisniowska. Faya is a senior teaching fellow at the Soa School of Law and the Center for International Studies and Diplomacy, and she's a co-founder of the Law, Environment, and Development Center. She's also a research associate in EU energy law and policy at Queen Mary University, and she's previously worked as a law and policy advisor at Client Earth, which is a not-for-profit environmental law organization. Faya completed her PhD in international law and forests in China, and her research focuses on climate change law, sustainable development, ecosystems law, and indigenous peoples' rights. She's done fieldwork in West Africa, East Asia, Russia, on issues such as illegal timber trade, community tenure rights, and Red Plus. A couple of times, I've had the pleasure of meeting Faya. She's always been just come from something or rushing off to something else, so safe to say, very busy. So we are very honored that you've been willing to take the time to support and participate in the series. And now I'd like to just hand over to Faya, and please give her a warm welcome to Faya Luznioska. Thank you. And thanks for inviting me to give this presentation this talk. It's a huge talk. It's a huge subject. I mean, we have the climate change law and energy policy, LLM course, and of course, that's 40 hours long, and it's too short. We don't cover enough. We don't even do cities. We have to break things up and not cover enough material in relationship, say, to looking in depth at case law and relationship to litigation and things like that. So once I sat down and thought, OK, right, climate change and law, it struck me that I was overwhelmed with exactly what to talk about. And I wanted to pitch this in a way that one wasn't patronizing to you as people who probably know a fair amount about climate change governance, the international climate change regimes. We've already, obviously, had the first two talks. And there's an inevitable overlap between the different social sciences, so between politics and development. And as you'll see next week with economics, all these interface, and law is at the forefront, but it's also an architect and a technician. So it helps create, in terms of the normative framing, but then it's also involved in the technicalities of delivering the regulatory structures to achieve certain objectives. But law is kind of everywhere. It's involved in development. It's very political. Some people would say law isn't political, but they're likely to be like technical people, very technical legal people. So what I recognize, and with the publicity that went out, it was like, we're going to cover international, regional, national law, damage, you know, rights, trade, security, litigation. It's enormous. So we're not going to cover everything in great detail. What I'd like to do is not spend a huge amount of time speaking. I'd like to have a really good conversation about what we think law can do and what we believe law is doing. Yeah, there's a lot of expectation about law. I mean, I kind of had it when I first started. And my faith in law has been tempered somewhat over the years. I'll move this on just for the climate change. Obviously, it exists, climate exists. It's there. It's been changing for millennia. But climate change in terms of the story about climate change as a new tragedy of the commons began back in the late 1980s. Now, the reason I call it the new tragedy of the commons, this was the emergence, very much linked to technologies in the late 1960s. So we have the moon landing. Not long after the moon landing, we have the moon treaty in 1972. The first multilateral environmental agreement about common concern, common heritage, rather, of the moon so nobody can go and extract from the moon minerals. These things are being challenged now because it's cheaper to go to the moon. The desire to get the minerals is greater because of the lack, the perceived scarcity on Earth. There's also the deep sea minerals. Now, deep sea minerals, again, back in the early 1970s, this became a really contentious issue, particularly because the most valuable deep sea minerals tended to be in the global south. But the money to extract from the deep sea bed and the technologies lay in the global north. So a deep sea bed declaration of the UN was agreed and it was recognized that they were of common heritage and that nobody could extract deep sea bed minerals for private gain, for commercial use. Again, that is actually under threat now. If you go on the Law of the Sea website, you'll see that there's lots of issues and claims about accessing deep sea bed minerals. Main countries are emerging economies. China's one of the biggest. So these are for rare earth metals, particularly, what's interesting, the technologies that we would use to address climate change, so renewable energy. And finally, the big one was the depletion in the ozone, the hole in the ozone. Of course, the technologies that detected the hole in the ozone were satellite technologies. Those technologies also fed into early scientific data to determine the fact that climate change was occurring, right? So there are linkages between the discovery about the hole in the ozone and the start of the climate change awareness around climate change. So the ozone layer, the hole in the ozone was addressed by the Vienna Convention, but most notably the Montreal Protocol. Montreal Protocol agreed in the late 1980s was seen to be the masterpiece of the way to go to resolve issues of common heritage, common concern, rather, amongst the global states. There were targets. There were identified gases. And everybody agreed there was differentiation between the developed countries and the non-developing countries. And this was very important in terms of negotiations for the UN Convention on Climate Change and the subsequent attempt to develop the Kyoto Protocol in the way that that's been developed. So that's the kind of big story. We have a period of time when we're perceiving common threats, right? Now I'm articulating it in a certain way, right? This is retrospectively, we are perceiving common threats, right? Who was perceiving these common threats? Who was setting those agendas? The contention around international environment related law is that those agendas were very much being set by the global north. But there was this contestation between the global north and the global south over resources. They were resources, apart from the ozone. It wasn't a resource, but the whole was due to refrigerators and CFCs. So it was linked to development. It was linked to sovereignty, right to development. And the fact that businesses were involved in the global north who could say, right, we've changed how we're producing something, we'll go ahead with this treaty. It led to more and more tensions between the global north and global south. This is a lecture about the history of environmental law. That we shall go on. The reason those are here, common heritage, as I said, is the idea that we collectively have an interest, common concerns, common differentiated responsibilities. Like I said, in the Montreal Protocol, this was the first time within a legally binding treaty that you had a recognition that there was a difference between the contribution to the problem and therefore a differentiation in the solution. So grandfathering approaches were introduced. Polluter pays. And climate change, this is a very big question. Who is the polluter and how are they paying and who are they paying? Recaution. Once you have knowledge that your actions are going to have an impact, should you continue to undertake those actions that are having an impact? Particularly if those actions are having an impact beyond your territory. So if you set fire, you know full well if you set fire to your neighbor's house, it will burn down and it will put their lives at risk. Should you be held accountable for that action? But in the international law, this is problematic, transboundary harm as it's referred to, because you've got to attribute your actions to the cause and the problem. And it's not that straightforward. A clear example is forests in Indonesia burning and causing smoke pollution in Singapore, Malaysia, and China. And the effort to try and take that to court to hold them liable for the nuisance, they're using tort law, for the nuisance caused to the citizens in their country. So it's a class action, health impacts from several months' worth of forest fires burning. Wise uses sustainable development. This was a sort of mega norm that had emerged by the early 1990s. And it was this collective idea that we could, as a whole, as a global body of states come together and use the resources that we have in a way that is sustainable, but also contributes to development. Nobody's left behind. It perpetuates the idea that we can continue to progress. Climate change is doing to law, and it's not recognized, is it has brought law to a tipping point, because law is based on this idea that we are in control, and we are in control of the earth. Earth is something that we do too, not that it does something to us. And law is constructed now in a way, and I'm saying this in terms of sovereign law, international law, and putting to one side customary indigenous peoples, other, and also religious, law, where this is more complex. But often that's not part of the narrative. When Bruno Littall is talking, he is talking about our relationship through our ideological frameworks and settings, and law is the rulebook for that. And so we are now in a position where the earth is starting to get back at us. It's upsetting the apple cart of a particular framing of the way in which we understand how law operates. Like law is something that is essentially established to provide certainty, is to provide outcomes that are predictable. You want to know that when you implement laws, the outcome will be understood, it will be repeated again and again. You don't want uncertainty, and you don't want extreme risk. And law has not had to deal with that aside from perhaps extreme wars periodically over the centuries. And then we have martial law and things like that. So law is really at a tipping point and very strained and threatened. And this isn't recognized. It isn't recognized in many ways within people that are working on climate change, a lot of people, because it's very hard to take on board. And it definitely isn't recognized by the majority of the legal profession globally. And it definitely isn't recognized by policymakers and politicians. When they think about climate change, it's not about destabilization of the whole of the way in which society and governance operates. The reason I want to talk about time is because the idea of law, as we know it, is linear. We are moving towards a point. That point is one of progress. But we work with, in terms of international law, universal law, human rights law, trade law, environmental law, it's all moving towards a better point. We are all trying to achieve a better end goal. We all believe that end goal is possible. We all believe in the progress. That is what modernism and law of modernism, liberal law of the state, sells us, is what we believe in. And even when we have so much evidence that that is not the case, we still hold on to that belief. We believe we are moving in a single linear arrow towards an end point. It was very difficult about time, even when you think of it in a linear sense, because when it's portrayed in this sense, there's an end point. And I don't think there is an end point, myself, in a linear sense, and I'll talk about that a little bit later. But what happens when you use this sort of imagery, and it's very common within the Anthropocene idea, is that we feel either paralyzed, we can't do anything, or we must do something, and it kind of doesn't matter what it is. As long as something is done, we will be getting there. And as the window to do something in terms of climate change gets smaller, anything goes. But then we move into sort of geoengineering. So obviously, with Paris Agreement, we have a target. We want to get to that target. We have timelines. We have up to 2050 variations in economic modeling from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We're all sort of biting our nails, going, oh, no, when the next IPCC report comes out, what's it going to say? Is it going to say we have less time? Does that mean we're going to have to take more extreme measures because we have to beat the clock and we have to make sure that we beat the clock in a way that we keep progress growing? Think in any other way. And I think it's very difficult. I mean, I was here for Larry's talk and about decolonizing ourselves. It's very hard when you work and operate in an environment, a society, a world that operates in this way to think and act in a different way. You can write about it, but it's very hard to realize it in your life and create it in law. This also doesn't take on board the extreme risk and uncertainty. We still believe that if we do certain things, so one of my hobby horses is carbon capture and storage, if we could only build 400 carbon capture and storage units within the space of 20 years of a certain size, get them built, we can sequester enough carbon and have business as usual in terms of our lifestyle. There's no accounting for the impacts of climate change, the effects of extraction of natural resources to build these things, the location of these things and the impacts on ecosystem services. There's no thinking about that. So when you go, I mean, we looked at this in class, when you look at the, you might be a carbon capture and storage devotee, so when we look at these things, when you look at the website of the carbon capture and storage global network advocacy body, thinking in a way that takes on risk and uncertainty, they use some of that language to try to justify the regulatory changes that are needed, but they don't take it on board in terms of their actual vision in a broader context. So there's a perpetual denial that is fostered by this approach of linearity and shutting down. We foreclose options by continually looking in this way and taking this approach. Yeah? And what's, well, we'll talk about that at the beginning. Enormous, there are enormous challenges, but those challenges have different priorities because they're narratives and they're competing and inequities. We've spoken about that a bit earlier as you summarized the differentiation between the global north and the global south in terms of political power, this differentiation in terms of accessing even the climate change agenda. So the emphasis is on mitigation. Mitigation happens to be where technology is, where money is, adaptation gets less attention. Loss and damage, which is the idea that there is some sort of restitution with the fact that certain countries, small island developing states, and low-lying coastal areas, that they are going to need to be moved, they need to be recognized that the impacts, say this is Hurricane Haiyan in the Philippines, the cost of that, no compensation. I mean, this goes back to the polluter pays principle. Who's paying for this? Who's paying for this damage? And where does it come up in this sort of hierarchy? Point that was raised in Larry Loma's talk and I think I feel very strongly about this. I think there's an inequity in response and it's geographical and it's racial. There's those that are almost all nice to the poor and the vulnerable can be dispensed with. Their lives are less valuable. Now, of course, in law, that's not true because in law, we've got human rights and in human rights, everybody's equal and everybody's life is valuable and we believe in that and we believe that everybody's life should be saved and we should invest in new drugs to ensure that people will stay alive and things. But we all know about the inequity and sort of distribution of healthcare. The distribution of impacts of climate change are not matched by the distribution and resources to address the impacts and the justification is mitigation is still the primary issue and mitigation has to happen in the greatest emitting countries and they're the ones with the resources and also they're the ones with the best governance structures and laws and they can bring in law, bring in things. They can initiate new markets. They can initiate the appropriate regulatory structures, new standards and adhere to these standards and that's a real problem. I don't know how Andrew dealt with the issue about the way in which development is addressing climate change. We do have the notion of sort of new worlds, new cities. Everybody's very hopeful about cities. There's the mayor, what's it called, city mayors there's 40 cities that have got together and have committed to reduce their emissions to zero emissions by 2050 and they are spread throughout the world. So this idea that cities can be centers where you have development, you meet human rights, you have a new vision, a new world. There's an event called Habitat and Habitat 3 last year predicted that 75% of the global population by 2050 will be living in cities. That's a massive change in the governance structures of how we're gonna live. There's lots of legal issues about this. If you vacate the territories beyond cities, how are they going to be administered? Who is going to be controlling them? What's gonna happen to the other third? Are the other third going to still be the indigenous peoples and communities? Are they going to take on roles to manage the sequestration capacity of land and forests? If they do, do they have to take on contracts and then liability in a sense of being a contractor who has a responsibility to deliver a service and they deliver that service to a buyer in a city who buys emission reductions from the forest dwellers? These are all visions that are extraordinary complex. And again, it goes back to this issue of the straight line and that we're just sort of going to get there somehow. Building all these cities, where are all the resources going to come from? Where is all the power coming from? Are they going to, what is labor going to do? And another one of my favorites is where does the automation fit in? Robots coming in, right? You very rarely get a discussion about robots and climate change together, but it needs to happen, that's one of my... So think about robots, governance over robots and law and robots, climate change and human beings and work and labor and value and a rising population. There's no, I don't have any answers. These are the sort of things that keep me awake at night. I just, you know, there's these competing priorities. And like I say, mitigation takes priority, mitigation has become dominated by market-based approaches. We've all heard of emissions trading schemes where you have a unit of carbon, one tonne of carbon is equivalent to something. Is it equivalent to a certain number of trees sequestering over a certain period of time? Is it equivalent to not burning a certain amount of coal? And then that being traded. And where does the value come in? The value comes in as long as you're bringing, if you have a cap on the amount that can be emitted, then the value rises. So you need more and more markets for it to actually function, for it to work. And we are seeing that, we're seeing more and more markets. And the Paris Agreement encourages more markets. Its language is a bit tempered because of the opposition to market-based mechanisms among some of the southern states, particularly in Latin America, but it's there. And the train is out of the station, it's gone. Those that don't want market-based mechanisms forget it, they're there, they're not gonna disappear. There's so many other things and it was on the list of things for me to talk about. So security, the anxieties around security, the change in the sense of security and climate change being something that it will possibly lead and accentuate existing conflicts in areas that are already stressed to a militarized sense of security where we're beginning to, and this feeds into the narrative now of building walls. I was at an event yesterday and I was asking a guy that works on European energy about energy security and refugees, climate change, refugees and displacement. They actually factoring in the numbers, the expectation, globally, the expectation is around 200 million climate change refugees by 2050. How do you factor that movement of people into your plans? Again, it's the whole linear thing. Things aren't going to change. We're going to build CCS plants. We're going to create this. We're going to, what about the movement of peoples? What about the impact of rising temperatures on infrastructure, on people's health, on crops, on therefore trade patterns? And it's trying to work with that and how does the law work with that? Because law is pretty slow and wants predictability and wants to offer a framework for people to engage in either control over property, control over contracts in exchange of services, administration of functions of governance. Obviously we've got human rights. I know the big one and we've mentioned that there's lots of things. So we're going to, hopefully this is a bit more. But we do have climate change law and there's lots of books about climate change law and there's lots of articles. And the, what's so, this is, the LSE have spent time in the past, since about 2012 I was thinking, gathering climate change legislation and policy and counting it throughout the world and identifying it. So one of the big questions is, what constitutes climate change legislation? Does it have to have the word climate change in it? Does it have to merely affect in a way that is contributing to mitigation and abatement or would you include something that is definitely contributing to adaptation? So the definition of what constitutes climate change law itself is very problematic. Lots of law contributes to climate change. Investment law contributes to climate change, but often in a negative sense. We see that we've got lots of, well, quite a lot, 854 climate laws and policies, which you might go, that's very encouraging. Most of those are energy sector. So most of those are in countries that have existing energy infrastructure and it's building up the renewable energy sector. So there's well over, the 854, there's well over half to two thirds related to renewable energy and alternative energy sources. Alternative energy, would you include in your climate change legislation fracking? It's a lower carbon according to certain measurements or would you not? There's much less legislation around adaptation and around land use and land use change and forestry. Constitutes climate change law when you're looking for documenting climate change law. I mean, obviously a very helpful one is the UK, which is called the Climate Change Act. So that's like, yes, that must be climate change. Although the UK is soon possibly going to be up in front of a court for failing to deliver policies to meet the climate change budget target under the regulation. They have targets that they're supposed to be meeting and policies that the UK have, are definitely not going to meet those targets. How are we dealing time with? In terms of classic narrative, so international law and climate change and what I wanted to avoid was to come here and talk about in this year, this happened in this year. But we do know in 1997 the Kyoto Protocol was agreed. Kyoto Protocol basically looked to the Montreal Protocol as a template upon which to resolve a problem. An atmospheric problem, global commons problem, but the complexity of climate change is not the same as addressing ozone-depleting substances. You had like six gases, ozone-depleting gases. You could identify them and you could set targets and you could differentiate quite easily and it didn't affect the whole of the infrastructure and the way in which society lives. Kyoto Protocol was trying to do the same. Identify five gases, include those gases under targets. Those most responsible, differentiated, take on responsibilities, legally binding responsibilities for emission reductions under those targets that they decide on their own. And the target only being a 5% reduction. Everybody knew it was inadequate, but it was like, well, this gets us going. Again, the idea, we're on the train of progress towards the point that we're trying to get to. So it doesn't matter that we're spending a lot of time in resources to agree this thing and we know it's inadequate, but we'll go with it. So when Kyoto got agreed in 1997, there was euphoria. I mean, there was a real sense of, this is fantastic. We know it's a bit substandard, but we're on our way. And it's an international agreement. Everybody's agreed, there's some legally binding bits, and we've recognized differentiation. So the developing world could keep developing. That's great, yeah. As we know, America didn't sign up. It didn't actually enter into force until much later in 2000. In 2005. And it brought in a lot of the market-based mechanisms. But what is fascinating is, again, we've got the Paris Agreement. It's heralded as a major achievement. When people talk about it, it's like, everybody's involved, everybody's got some commitment, their nationally determined contributions, which aren't legally binding. When we add up all the nationally determined contributions that aren't legally binding, we're going to go 2.7 to 3.4. We were trying to go 1.5 to 2. But it's great. So we're on the way, we're on the way. And it's an internationally-leagued binding. Everybody's involved, let's celebrate, it's great. It falls into that rhetoric of, we believe that we can make progress with this. It's based on progress. It's based on a ratcheting mechanism. Every five years, we report. Our reports will be very honest. We can trust them from everybody. There will be no double counting. There will be no inaccuracies. They will tell us exactly what we need to know. And then we can increase our ambition. And then we will move along sequentially in a very linear fashion and achieve by 2050 the goal because we will have increased our ambition and we will have got to 1.5. So within the space of six months, it was made very clear that we, it's almost, in almost like 98% unlikely that we're going to have it get 1.5 at all. We are already over 1% in terms of global warming beyond pre-industrial temperatures. So 1.5, it's almost certain to happen. Some people are saying it's going to happen by 2020. That has massive ramifications for tipping points, implications for the most vulnerable, small understates, et cetera. Where is the law now for these things? There is a great deal of discussion about how are we going to manage climate refugees and displacement. It actually gets one mention in the climate, in the Paris Agreement and only gets one mention in the preamble. Not even warranted. And it's within other, it's indigenous peoples, human rights, we recognize they're important. It doesn't warrant a section. When you do have a recognition which is the loss and damage mechanism, that's tempered by another paragraph in the whole Paris decision, which says, well, hang on, we recognize that there's going to be loss and damage. There's a mechanism, we'll track it, we'll report about it, but nobody's getting any compensation. Nobody's getting anything from anybody. So again, a celebration of a mechanism, of a triumphalism, of achievement in international law which is giving indicators, because everybody's like, well, now we've got the Paris Agreement, all the other laws can start happening. But there'll be laws to realize an agreement that isn't arguably fit for purpose and perpetuates this denialism, moving forward and there are seem to be opportunities. And those that are in favor of climate justice and believe that this is an opportunity to redress imbalances, inequities that have existed, so since pre-colonial times and colonial times and perhaps this is the time we can actually create new structures and new ways of doing things and new ideas, et cetera, et cetera, that this gives us an opportunity in a space and a forum. I don't see that happening to the level that it would be needed. And in terms of law, what laws are we talking about in terms of in a global sense? If we're moving away from the international legal order and moving away from the international legal system, there's a guide to Donald Trump's quite keen on moving away from that. And we get quite anxious because we're quite attached to human rights, international order that maintains ideas that we're quite attached to. And then there's the people that are like, well, actually, this really is only gonna happen if we invest and recognize that profit incentives, profit motives, other things that will attract the big pockets to put money in, to change away from the emissions industries to new low-carbon industries, eh? So everybody loves the new big investors. One of my favorites is Elon Musk. Elon Musk, he's latest being the roof and came out the other day and said, yeah, the roof is gonna be cheaper than a normal roof. So where are all the resources coming from to build these roofs? Who are they going to be targeted at? Who has these types of roofs? What kind of houses are we talking about? Same with the kind of cars. It's a business as usual type of economy with the green technologies. And it doesn't address social, et cetera, aspects. Are the social inequities, and this is a sort of Naomi Klein perspective, are the social inequities part of the problem? And if they are, then how do you address those in a way that you're actually moving in terms of away from low-carbon, away from carbon-based technologies? Because you do need to invest in technologies. There is a technological dimension to it whether you like technologies or not. Everybody here, I'm sure, has an iPhone or a phone of some kind. We're part of it and it's trying to work that out. This is my final slide. This is the appropriate person to have, possibly on International Women's Day. She wrote the Manifesto, the Cyborg Manifesto, back in the 1980s. That was about the relationship between society and technology. It was a very feminist kind of critique there. And she's just written a very interesting book, which is a critique of the Anthropocene. The Concept of the Anthropocene. Because the concept of the Anthropocene itself gives us this idea that we now are in a time where human beings are having such a big effect on the planet that we can now also control our effect on the planet. That we, this goes away from the Bruno Latour idea, that we can work out a way in which to manage the planet. And in managing the planets, you need regulation, you need rules, you need standards, you will probably curtail certain human rights because people can't do things, people can do things. It would be a complete top-down management system with this idea of control. The Anthropocene is about control. We've been out of control, we now need to be controlled. The boundaries, there's a certain amount of stuff, there's a certain amount of carbon, certain amount of water, and it will get allocated. And some people argue that, okay, that can happen in a very socialist, kind of top-down almost communist sense. It can happen in a, where we have a sort of capital of seen sense, where allocation is through the market. My other argument is that the world is basically more complex. We are part of a great complexity and we cannot control that complexity. And that has a lot of messages for law. How does law work with complexity? How do we move away from legal modernism? The control of international law of states, international law of states managing the environment. So we have a multi-lateral environment agreements, biodiversity, desertification, stuff from forests, air quality, ozone, et cetera. And so we've tried to manage all these different things. And the idea of the asropocene is we keep managing things. Where our relationship is going to be so challenged by the impacts of climate change within the next 50 years, that our relationship to the earth, and the sense that Latour has talked about, that it is engaging with us in a way that we have not had to engage with it before for a very long time, will force a change in the way the paradigm of law. Now there definitely are peoples who live and have legal systems that engage with the natural world in ways that are more interconnected than our systems in terms of civil and Roman common law systems. So the sense of listening to indigenous peoples, understanding traditional knowledge, which of course is challenged by climate change because the context is shifting, but still the way of understanding and hearing is something we can learn from. I thought of Haraways, but looks to use the word critters from California, so it talks about insects and things in the ocean, things that are, have got multiple legs and strange colors, and that there is going to be a big liberation in some ways of how we interact and perceive the environment and the way in which law will conceive and construct itself. This isn't going to happen in a linear fashion. This isn't going to happen by 2050. It's going to happen in locations. It's going to emerge. And as she says, we have to stay with the trouble because there is trouble and as lawyers we need to react and engage with that trouble in ways that are more creative and imaginative than we have previously. And so that will be the end of our denial. But thank you very much. Thank you so much, Hara, for this, I'd say profound analysis of problems between classical ideas of what law is and the challenge is now proposed by climate change. We'll now move on to our questions and discussions part. And I just want to say briefly that I understand that many of you and myself included when I asked questions want to give a lot of background information for why I'm asking this specific question and stuff, but just in conscious of time, we'd like to ask you to keep your questions as brief as possible so that we can accommodate as many people as possible. We're going to, yeah, we'll see how it goes. Maybe take a few questions at a time and then, and Faya, if you could just, when you're answering the questions, just repeat them into the, yeah. That's okay, fine, I'll just go for it. We'll get to sit down. Okay, thanks a lot. So in terms of public interest litigation, what's very interesting about public interest litigation is how it's being used in different parts of the world. It's the opportunities and the spaces to address environment and climate-related issues using the courts and using procedural mechanisms vary obviously across the world, depending on the opportunities in terms of the legal system, the governance system. So there's definitely places where that's completely foreclosed, right? There are moments when there are possibilities to achieve advances in public interest litigation and India's been very good at a particular point in time. And then often again, it gets shut down. There's a backlash against judicial activism. It's a term that's been used here by the current government against judicial activism in a human rights context. Investment in litigation, and I think we mentioned the, yeah, tomorrow, the talk by Fahana Yaman about the use of litigation post-Paris. In terms of climate change litigation, there's been over time particular cases. So there's been cases brought by the Indian in the second polar region. And they've took it to the American, the American Regional Human Rights Council for commission rather. The idea was to begin to actually get stories heard. It's getting narratives heard. So in terms of that, that was about indigenous peoples and their story about the impacts of climate change. Long time public interest litigation don't ever think that case is going to be a success. But it's about getting the stories heard and getting those stories heard cumulatively. And there is now pretty much a global strategy amongst litigation lawyers to develop litigation cases to advance different areas and different issues on climate change. So you have civil case litigation against corporate companies. You have litigation against governments for failing on a constitutional obligations. You have litigation against governments, and this would be the case in the UK, for failing on a procedural obligation in terms of the Climate Change Act. So there's these new linked up public interest global litigation strategies going on. And we've got one going on in, well, there's two going on in America. So this one, the Exxon attempt to hold accountable for prior knowledge of the impacts of climate change that actions on to climate change. And this goes back to the polluter pays. It goes back to precautionary principles. So sort of normative things. There are massive hurdles to be addressed if you want to be successful because essentially these are talk cases. You have to prove relationships. You have to prove causation. And it's very, very difficult. There are attempts to do this now, but it's very, very hard. But there are in terms of like public interest litigation regarding obligations through constitutional obligations. There was the Dutch case two years ago. There's just been a case in Vienna, in Austria. There was a judgment that a third runway couldn't be built because it was against the public interest. The impacts of climate change are much greater than the economic benefits. That's going to be appealed, but that outcome is really significant again as a story. It's a big move to suddenly say, actually the impacts of climate change are more damaging than the economic benefits of having a new runway at this airport. Because that changes our ideas and thinking. And then there's one in Oregon. There's going to be future generations case where I think they've included, yeah, they've included Donald Trump, that he's failing again on a constitutional front with, so a lot of the time, I mean, I know with Klein-Hurth and the clean air, the work that they've been doing against the UK about air quality. They've been doing that since they started. When they started, and there was only about four lawyers, that was the first thing that they started with. And they've still been doing it. It's actually a guy who came to SOAS and did an LLM, Alan Andrews, who is the lead lawyer in Klein-Hurth working on that. So you can go places. He didn't want to work on forest because he thought it was a bit too broad. They've been chipping away at that. You just have to keep, you've dedicated your life to these things. It's not one in a moment, it's a dedication. And it's a dedication to changing a huge, huge system and trying to change the moral and political framing for understanding how we're going to create rules and regulations. So it's very, very important. So I encourage you to come to talk tomorrow. What can individuals do? Obviously it depends what the individual, who the individual is and where they are. And I wouldn't say light bulbs or anything like that. I think it's very much a personal issue that you look to yourself. You are motivated, what motivates you, what drives you? Where are your passions? And that's then think about how you can take what you are and use it to contribute to something. We have to move away from sort of hero narratives. We are, I mean, this is where I like sort of the Donna Haraway thing. We are like little critters. We are trying to be and in the trouble and in the chaos to contribute to a change in a little way, you know. I have a reasonably old, I have a long story. Some of it should surprise people if I told them but I'm here now and I'm doing what I'm doing. And sometimes I don't like doing what I'm doing but I believe that I'm adding to, I don't think I'm making a huge difference but I'm adding to change. And it's, so I think it's something that you need to wrestle with. I think people need to wrestle with that. But the fact you even ask it is a big thing. The fact you even reflect on it and talk to people and even come here on a Wednesday evening is a key thing and you've got friends and you've got networks and inform yourself and stuff. But I wouldn't dare say do this, do that. Linear triumphalism has a role. It will continue to have a role without a shadow of a doubt and it's not to say it's either or, that's the thing. It has a place but what I'm trying to flag up here is how we all close different ways of seeing by only going with the, we're moving in this direction, we can achieve this, we must achieve this. And then like I said earlier on that we then start to, through panic and desperation, undertake actions that are extremely damaging and I think the self-interest and the inequity and power of those that are pushing some of this agenda if we're looking at it through the technologies and possibly moving towards extremes like geoengineering which are really like in the next five years I think we could see justification for geoengineering at a political level because it's been coming up the agenda anyway and then after Paris with the 1.5% target suddenly all these geoengineers, scientists and geoengineer companies and advocates reemerged and were like yep we need to do stuff and we're starting to get access to politicians and investors and all you need is somebody with deep pockets who likes the idea of putting iron filings in the ocean to sequester carbon and then you're away. It just, that's all it takes and the only thing that's holding that back is a moratorium between states under the Convention on Biological Diversity and also a regulation in the London Protocol that I'm on the law to see about dumping waste so law is quite important but it's tenuous, it's so tenuous I think that another thing is that law is very fragile I mean we know that about human rights and how it fails in many fronts but law is so fragile it can go any direction at any point depending on circumstances but I think vision and idea but broadening but the guys are changing in more way. In terms of attention between the apocalyptic scenarios and the transition to a clean, green, ordered world, I see this happening in a circle. There is going to be the Hurricane Haians, there is going to be slow onset, loss in damage in terms of droughts, in terms of flooding, there is going to be displacement and we'll get to the question about definitions of environmental refugees. That is going to take place alongside the continuation of investing in and attempting to create a world that is functioning in a post fossil fuel dependent way. So I don't, it's not an either or, I don't, you know, sort of Mad Max world yet, like coming and that's it. I think that these two are going to be occurring simultaneously. What concerns me more is that the climate change impacts, the more apocalyptic side is happening and is going to happen more in vulnerable, least developed countries that have a least capacity to adapt and invest and as the cost of adaptation in developed countries increases, the willingness to invest in adaptation in least developed countries will go down and that worries me a great deal, you know, because adaptation, the gap between mitigation and adaptation funding globally is very significant anyway. But if you just look at that in terms of domestic, there is a gap between mitigation and adaptation funding and if, I mean, when it happened here and they were flooding, it suddenly like, oh, we need to spend more on flood defences and now we have a narrative of like, well really we shouldn't be sending money overseas than overseas development assistance. We're happening at the same time, but it's the geographies of it, where it's happening, which I think are more concerning, because it's not equitable. So you will also see a generation of lawyers that are really o-fay with kind of, you know, new contracts on decentralizing energy systems, et cetera, et cetera, in areas where there's more stable and there's a creation and a move to low carbon transition energy systems and maybe smart agricultural systems and then other areas where we're into sort of disaster management and, you know, disaster response, which is going to be a very different scenario. Definition of environmental refugees and then we've got climate change refugees. There isn't a definition of environmental refugees, definitions according to the Convention on Refugees in the 1950s is basically political refugees and then you have, you know, impacts from war, et cetera, et cetera. But the issue is that if, how do you define somebody that has become a refugee through climate change? They may have become a refugee because of conflicts as a result of climate change or partially as a result of climate change. So they could be qualified in that sense as a refugee and then somebody else could lose their land, their livelihoods on land because of drought and then they'll be an economic refugee and then they wouldn't actually be able to claim refugee status. And I think, I mean, there's lots of... I read a very interesting paper which I'm going to circulate about loss and damage and climate change displacement and the idea that displaced peoples could claim for loss and damage. This is something that happened in the Second World War that people also managed to get restitution for lost property but loss and damage in terms of movement, loss of livelihood, loss of stability, from having to move through no fault of their own. But again, it comes down, with loss and damage, it comes down to causation and proving under sort of classic legal systems. But I think again, we'd be very interested, there's some discussions going on around this, at the fringes of the debates on loss and damage within the UNFCCC and you can go onto the UNFCCC website and there's a loss and damage section and you can look there and look at current negotiations about what should be included in terms of monitoring loss and damage. Heathrow. People were very excited basically about the Vienna judgment and the consultations around Heathrow... Sorry, can you just brief me? Heathrow. Vienna... Yeah, the Vienna airport, as I said, there was a plan for a third runway at the airport in Vienna and there was a challenge to it basically by a climate change lobby group and they challenged the public interest of having a third runway and they won that case because the judge found in their favour that the economic benefits of a runway were less than the climate change impacts and therefore they couldn't justify a new runway. So it's very similar to Heathrow. It's just like it's an excellent parallel case. What's likely to happen is they'll have the consultations, then a decision will be made and it's after that point that you are likely to get some mobilisation for a case. There are already solicitors and barristers and legal folk lining up and trying to develop those cases. So it's likely to be more than one case as well. It'll go on planning but I would suspect there'll be a climate case on pretty similar to Vienna. Whether Vienna gets overturned or not, I'm sure Vienna is going to get overturned. Again, it's about litigation, moving ahead, changing the narrative. Renewable energy rather than just faith in renewables. Renewables are I think definitely, I don't have an issue about renewables. I mean, I don't know if I came across like that. But I think it's again, scale and ownership. For example, what I'm doing about the EU and energy policies is about decentralisation of energy systems and energy communities, establishing energy communities so that they can generate energy, sell enough energy to basically bring in an income but not with the ambition of becoming the biggest renewable energy provider in Europe. Whereas what we are seeing is some of the big companies, including oil and gas companies, investing heavily in renewables and buying up small companies and taking up that space in a very classic capitalist manoeuvre. This is a market opportunity. We can get in the economies of scale. We can produce more and quicker. Elon Musk is definitely along those lines. So you might go, that's great. The technology is great. But he's the equivalent of an Apple phone. You'll rent the roof off them. You'll put it up and you'll pay a bit. And everybody will have an Elon Musk roof. That's the idea. You can either go, that's what we need to do. We don't have enough time. That's not the problem. I'm not professing to say is that or that. I'll leave it there. I'm just going to say one other thing. In many least developed countries, the investment in renewable energy, and it's solar particularly, is from foreign companies. And so ownership of the infrastructure is controlled by foreign companies and so money is going out of the countries. Whereas that doesn't need to happen and it's not going to help in terms of wider investment to addressing adaptation. I like follow-up share. Then I also just want to make a brief note about what Faye mentioned. There is an event tomorrow night which the law environment and development centre is hosting. It's on the role of strategic communication in implementing the Paris Agreement from 7 to 8.30. It's in the Brunei Gallery 111. Yeah, none of you are interested. Is Hannah, called Significante of Pianist Moe La Perrin, inspiring kind of, inspiring, bringing forward new approaches to how we can think about climate change, how the arts can also be a way of conveying the necessity for climate action? Hannah, do you have a product on that? If any of you came to that event, we approached Hannah after the seminar. Also, tomorrow, and I think it's in here, at 8, is decolonising the environment. He's doing this. I'm sharing it. And there's an anthropologist whose name I forget from, is very interesting, using app technology with Indigenous peoples. Oh, Jerome Lewis, that's his name. He's coming, he's going to be talking. A guy named Ney, who is from ZDEP, who's talking about his work on climate change, forestry and Nigeria. And there's some people from Black Lives Matter and some other people I remember. But that's 8 o'clock, so it's balancing app. It's 7 o'clock. Litigation in here for decolonisation. And then maybe go away and have a drink. Great. Thank you everyone for coming. Let's give a fan another round of applause.