 The first panel, and it's a fantastic one. I'm so looking forward to this. It's on research, trends, gaps, and priorities for climate litigation. So if you're not here for climate litigation, you're in the wrong room. I know this college is very confusing and it's easy to get lost, so that's OK. But if you're here for climate litigation, we have many treats in store for you today. Without further ado, I will introduce our first panelist. His name is Ben Franta. He's a PhD candidate in history at Stanford University, where he studies the history of climate science, climate change politics, and fossil fuel producers. But I actually think the bio that I have is a bit out of date, because aren't you now at the University of Oxford, leading the climate litigation initiative, I want to say. Lab. Lab, fantastic. Preview of the talk, yeah. Yeah, Ben also has a PhD in applied physics as well, from Harvard and a JD from Stanford Law School and is a licensed attorney in the state of California. Ben will be talking about a new initiative to inform global climate litigation through research. So Ben, please take it away. Thank you. My name is Ben Franta. I'm a lawyer and just started here at Oxford. I'm a senior research fellow in climate litigation. And we're starting something called the Climate Litigation Lab here, within the Sustainable Law Program, which is part of the Smith School and part of the School of Geography and affiliated with the Law School. But I want to tell you about it, because I think it'll be relevant for the interface between climate litigation and research. And hopefully, we'll help set the stage for the other talks. So climate litigation continues to grow around the world quite rapidly. This is from the recent climate litigation assessment from Setzer and Hyam from this year. And they found that there's around 2,000 climate lawsuits ongoing right now, and about a quarter of them have been filed within the last two years. So that gives you a sense of how this space is expanding very rapidly. And as you can see, this is the distribution of cases around the world. And it's a bit uneven right now. But you can see there's jurisdictions all over the world. I think in around 40 countries or so, there are climate cases ongoing. And they're quite diverse. There's a bunch of litigation areas that are developing currently. These are just some of them. One strategy that's grown in Europe in particular is to try to obtain injunctions to force corporations and governments to align their policies and their actions with the Paris Agreement. You might have heard about the Royal Dutch Shell case in the Netherlands or the Urgenda case there as well. It's the same strategy that's being pursued now targeting different companies, different governments. This is one of the most recent developments. This is a suit against total energies, the French company. And some more parties just got involved with that. Paris and New York just joined that suit. And again, that is to seek an injunction or a court order to compel the company to align its business plans with the Paris Agreement. Another area of litigation is in the US. The Americans sort of famous for being litigious and for its kind of strong tort system. But there are a series of cases there targeting fossil fuel companies for alleged deception of the public regarding climate change seeking compensation for the damages that flow from that deception. So those cases have been ongoing for about five years or so. And they've been succeeding from the plaintiff's side, but it takes a while to work through the court system. So those cases are moving towards discovery, which would potentially be very interesting. And so that's another front as well. And then a third area is the use of international courts to address climate change. You might have heard about Vanuatu seeking an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice. This is another area. And it's somewhat of an open question, I think. What are promising strategies in using international courts to address climate change? That's an important area to examine. So when I look at this overview of climate litigation, I think there are a few takeaways. One is that litigation has great potential to accelerate the energy transition and directly address issues of climate justice, which are also obviously very important. And the law is an area that's equipped to address those things directly. At the same time, there's a need for specialized, targeted research to help inform these suits. Scientific research, investigative research, legal strategy research. And through this, we can accelerate climate litigation and supercharge it so that it can play the greatest role it can in addressing these issues. Accelerating the energy transition and addressing climate justice. So this month here at Oxford, we've founded or created the Climate Litigation Lab, so we're calling it. It's totally new. And I'm sorry, I couldn't find a better picture for this slide other than myself with a haircut. But this is part of the Sustainable Law Program, which is also quite new. It was just created last year. So again, this is an area where we want to apply the law to issues of sustainability and climate change. And how we do that is somewhat open. And you're here in this room, so you can play a role in shaping that. We're going to have three initial focus areas for research in the Climate Litigation Lab. So one will be damages, climate damages. This will involve attribution science, economics, ecology. Of course, there's been discussion of pursuing things like biodiversity litigation and how do you articulate issues of damages in that issue. In a second area, I'm just calling it investigations, but doing research on relevant issues to do with legally relevant entities for climate litigation, corporations, governments, net zero commitments. How can the law be used to enforce net zero commitments or deter empty commitments? Very important. Another hot area lately has been greenwashing discussions, so advertisements that might be misleading or things of that sort. And then finally, legal strategy. What are creative remedies that can be pursued? What sort of courts can be utilized? Doctrinal and case research and so on. So this is pretty broad, and we intend to hire across these areas, scientists, social scientists, investigators, and lawyers. And we want to interface with climate litigation practitioners, meaning litigators, lawyers, and stakeholders, meaning parties, people affected by climate change worldwide. And we want to do this on a continuous basis to help us inform our research priorities. We want this research to be impactful, immediately useful, and not just research for the sake of research. And there are other initiatives in this area as well, so we want to synergize with them and complement their work as well. So work at Columbia, NYU, Union of Concerned Scientists, and elsewhere. And again, I like to say we're pursuing research that's timely, targeted, and rigorous. We want to pursue research projects that have a particular application that are going to be used in litigation. And we want it to be of the highest quality. And we're aware that when research is used in litigation often it's challenged by some of the parties. So it's going to be peer-reviewed for the most part, open access when possible. We want this to be broadly available and useful to parties involved in climate litigation all around the world. And so what are we doing now? Well, right now, I mean, I started three days ago here at Oxford. So we're fundraising. Our goal is to raise funds so we can do an initial round of hires for people to start probably this spring. But we want to hire at all levels. We want to have graduate students. We want to have postdocs. We want to have senior research fellows as well. People here in Oxford to come join us here, join our team here, and to work with remotely as well. And we want to grow to a pretty big team. I mean, as you can see, it's a pretty broad spectrum of research and topic areas that we want to address. So we want to have a critical mass of people in each area so that you can have that collaborative dialogue with your peers. So that's it. I realize this was somewhat of a plug. But this is what we're doing here now. And I hope that it's sort of helped set the stage for what other people are doing and has communicated the idea that this issue of climate litigation and the role it plays in the larger issue of dealing with global warming, the role it plays depends on what we do with it. And it could play many roles. It could be crucial. Or if we neglect it, then it might not play a big role. So it's up to us to figure that out. So I think I want to leave with that. All right, that's it. That's it. Thank you. Just a quick housekeeping note, which I should have made at the start of this panel. We will be taking questions after all of the panelists have spoken. So with that, let us turn to the next panelist. Her name is Lea DiSalvatore. She is a PhD candidate at the School of Law of the University of Nottingham and a visiting scholar at the Nova Law School in Lisbon. Her current research investigates legal barriers to hazing out fossil fuels in the global south. She's also one of the founders of Sustainable Development Watch, the academic platform of the LLM in Sustainable Development at the University of Milan. So without further ado, she will be presenting on the role of international investment law in protecting fossil fuel investments. Thank you so much, Lea. OK, so good morning, everybody. First of all, it is my great pleasure and honor to be here with you today in company of such brilliant and incredible minds. After Ben's presentation on climate litigation and how can they help climate change, I'm going to be a little bit more depressing and talk about how law actually protects fossil fuel industry. So I will be talking about international legal system that protects the private flow of money to fossil fuel projects, which is international investment law and how its mechanism, its enforcement mechanism, investment arbitration, what's the role that this mechanism plays in the global energy transition. So 45% to 50% of all oil and gas industrial projects are financed by foreign companies. That means that this great share of investors for being foreign or by using a foreign subsidiary generally can have access to a higher degree of protection for their investments under international investment law. And so international investment law, for who of you doesn't know, is formed by various instruments that are mainly international investment agreements. That can be bilateral investment agreements, multilateral investment agreements, trade agreements with investment chapters. The most famous of them all is the Energy Charter Treaty. So these international investment agreements typically include special treatment provisions and provisions on investor-state dispute settlement. Such provision can also be found in global south national legislations and investment contracts. One of the most important mechanisms granted by international investment law is the investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, because it is the enforcement mechanism of international investment law. It's a system that allows investors to sue governments over measures and actions that allegedly violate these very standards of treatment that are granted by these provisions in these treaties. So long story short, investors can seek compensation for a lost profit, or even future expected revenues for measures adopted by the country where they are investing. So we don't have the time here to go over the details of these provisions. But it suffices here to say that some of these special treatments can have conflicting objective with public policies, especially with climate and environmental ones. So for example, the decommissioning and reduced utilization of existing fossil fuel installations in the power sector, as well as cancellation of new installation, as it is literally suggested in the IPCC, in the latest IPCC report, are all measures that might be challenged by foreign investors as breach of substantive investment protections that those investment protections are generally direct, indirect expropriation, paranormal treatment. Within the paranormal treatment, there is also the legitimate expectation. So how much a company is legitimately expecting to gain in profits from that operation. And those are all extra protection that are granted under these treaties, national laws, or contracts. So I'm going to give you some very specific example of how climate change measures have been challenged in investment arbitration. Here I want to bring two examples. So the Netherlands was sued twice in 2021 by Uniper and RWE. This is because the Netherlands planned phase out call that we all know it's necessary at this point in time where we are, effectively curtailed the profits of these two energy giants. So they were claiming 1.4 billion US dollars in total from the Netherlands for lost profits. And Uniper, two months ago, was required to withdraw its claim against the Netherlands as a condition to get a German bailout package. So they still got bailed out by Germany. And they retired. They withdraw their claim. RWE claim is still pending. The second is Rock Upper versus Italy. This is because Italy adopted a ban in early 2016 that barred oil and gas exploration and production activity within 12 nautic miles of the Italian coastline. So as some of you may know, actually Italy had withdrawn from the Energy Charter Treaty. This claim is based on the Energy Charter Treaty. And Italy in 2016 had actually withdrawn from the Energy Charter Treaty. But because of the sunset clause, which is that clause that says that all investments that were made until 2016 were still protected by the Energy Charter Treaty, the tribunal limit that jurisdiction over it and went on with the case. That is not the only objections. Because they made also the objection, which is about bringing an intra-EU claim, which has been deemed by the European Court of Justice, non-contrary to European Union law. Still, they went away. And we have the first, this is the first award that was ever emitted on a climate change measure. And arbitrators found that Italy had effectively and directly expropriated Rock Upper's investment and awarded the company 185 million euros. This was just for exploration. They hadn't started yet. And this was the 23rd of August, 2022. All these cases, even the one above, were initiated under the ECT. Such a shame that Yamina couldn't be here with us today because she would have said a lot more about how the ECT works. Today, we already count seven arbitrations that have been initiated against climate measures, seven. And of all the fossil fuel arbitrations ever recorded, a third, 31%, are related to environmental issues. So the question that emerged in my research is how much fossil fuel industry, how much of this industry can rely on SDSD to protect its profit and shield itself from regulatory change? So in my latest report, I looked at the trends in the investor-state disputes in the fossil fuel industry to understand to what extent they actually, actually, ISDS, investor-state dispute settlements. So the enforcement mechanisms can be a threat to phasing out fossil fuels in the global energy transition. So first of all, the first result is that having initiated almost a fifth of all known fossil fuel arbitration, the fossil fuel industry is by far the most prestigious industry under international investment law. It has indiscussed leadership on numbering by very far any other sector. Second, the great majority of claims within fossil fuel arbitrations are related to investment in the upstream sector, even just exploration concessions that were the drilling or the extraction has not started yet. And you all know how this is problematic for climate change objective, because we should no longer extract any more fossil fuel resources if you want to stay within the Paris Agreement objectives. Three, in 72% of the cases where the tribunal reached an award and the award was disclosed, so in 72% of these cases, the decision was taken in favor of the investor. Moreover, cost of arbitration are extremely high and are much higher in the fossil fuel industry. So here you can see that the average award of fossil arbitration is five times higher than average award of non-fossil fuel arbitration. And if you look on the other table, you've got 10 largest amounts ever awarded. I can tell you eight of them are related for the fossil fuel industry, the first two as well from the fossil fuel industry. So I also have calculated the total amount awarded by the tribunal to carbon majors. And the total amount is $18 billion. And this is only the one we know, because as you can see in the table, there are so many that have not been disclosed because that award was not disclosed, so we don't know how much. Actually, they were awarded. It's still from the one we know, $19 billion. So this was a great range of issues, especially ethical issues. Who bears the cost at this point, given this system? Who's bearing the cost of the energy transition? Recent research shows that global action on climate change could generate upward of $340 billion in legal claim from fossil fuel investors. This is with Mozambique in the lead, which is one of the least developed countries in the world, with $31 billion of possible liability. Casually, Mozambique is also the case studies for my PhD. So just to put things in perspective, one of the many fossil fuel mega projects alone in Mozambique is values estimated at $30 billion. And the ISGDP ever recorded for Mozambique was in 2014, and it was almost $18 billion. So economically, how is it going to battle claims of this value? And I can also tell you from my research, my results that each one of the fossil fuel mega projects in the coal and in the gas industry are all protected under international investment law, and they all have direct access to ISDS under several legal resources. So I will conclude. So does ISDS constitute a risk for the global energy transition, and especially the global south in this case, given the example I've just made? Of course, yes. What does emerge is that in my research that the fossil fuel industry is and has always heavily relied on ISDS to protect its profit. Just to give you another quick example, ExxonMobil is one of the few, or at least the only one I know about, but one of the few business in the world that has a special legal division for investment arbitration within its legal department. And some of international investment law features were shaped by and evolved with the oil industry. So the industry has demonstrated over the years to have the economic capacity and political power to resort to ISDS, and they will do it in the future even more now with climate and environmental measures. I'm going to leave you on a question, a very big, provocative question, but whether you agree or not on giving compensations to these corporations for their lost profit, OK? Would it still be really the role of investment tribunals to decide the amount that has to be compensated for their operations? Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Jennifer. And just to mention that Yamina, who was meant to be on our panel and unfortunately was unable to attend, she has done some amazing work on the Energy Charter Treaty, which has been at the basis of a lot of these cases. And so I would encourage you all to have a look at her work online because she's unable to be here. Finally, I will hand over to our last panelist. Her name is Delta Murna. She's from the Union of Concerned Scientists. She leads their science hub for climate litigation and does amazing work on building greater capacity in the scientific community regarding conducting and communicating legally relevant research. And she will be speaking about the space between science and climate litigation, a decade of learning. Thank you so much, Delta. Take it away. I also am going to try to pivot a little bit from what I had originally put in my slides so we'll see how successful that is to be able to touch a little more specifically on some research gaps. So the beginning of my presentation kind of overlaps a little bit about what Ben talked about. So I'll go through that kind of quickly. And through that, I guess I want to talk about some broad lessons that we've learned kind of being in this space and trying to figure out the best way for scientists to engage in climate litigation and engage with the legal community, which isn't straightforward. And so I'll talk about that a little bit. And then I want to open up some space to talk more specifically about research trends and kind of gaps that we've identified. And hopefully Ben and I can take some time to talk about that for a recent paper that we've been working on. So as you might guess, this is a slide that overlaps a little bit with what Ben was saying. But a decade ago, groups around the world really started to see climate litigation as a potential tool for climate action. One of the ways that UCS was involved with that in 2012, there was a convening of a number of groups that came together to really talk about what strategic climate litigation might look like, pulling insights from tobacco control that I think draws upon how interdisciplinary this space is. And I want to really drive that home as we have a group of scholars that are working across different areas here. The engagement in climate litigation is a really diverse and interdisciplinary space. This graph shows the sharp increase, which Ben talked about so well. And he also mentioned some of the powerful wins that we've seen. Prominently, as some of you all might know and Ben mentioned briefly, in late May, there was a win in a Dutch court case that ruled that Royal Dutch Shell must cut carbon emissions from both its operations and the oil and gas products that the company sells. Never before has a fossil fuel company been ordered to reduce its heat-trapping emissions to address climate change. So I just wanted to re-highlight this because it shows that from a legal, a scientific, and from a societal perspective, the case against Royal Shell really leaves little doubt that individual companies can be held accountable for driving climate change and that there is potential within these strategies around climate litigation to really help to make those conclusions. Importantly, I guess, where you see kind of validation of some of these methods comes from the IPCC and the most recent IPCC did state that climate-related litigation has influenced the outcome and ambition of climate governance. The report goes on to say that outside of formal climate policy pressures, climate litigation is an important arena for various actors to confront and interact over how climate change should be governed. So if anyone was questioning kind of the role of climate litigation, the space that it plays, the scientific evidence and the evidence from the courtrooms is really building to show that there's an important space for this kind of in the overall discussion. All right, so for this talk, I'm gonna focus kind of briefly on four main kind of points and overviews, kind of lessons learned and persistent gaps that we're seeing in the community that's making it difficult for scientists to engage in the climate litigation space. Some of the steps that we're doing to help improve that and through that we'll get a little bit more into these actual gaps that we're seeing. So first, I wanna talk about climate litigation demands, how it demands new pathways for communication. So right now, there's insufficient pathways for communication in this space. I'm gonna touch upon climate litigation, so climate litigation provides unique research opportunities for scientists. There's also cross-disciplinary collaboration between science and the law that can be really catalytic that can help to serve both communities in new and exciting ways. And then I'll talk a little bit about research gaps and some hopes and reasons why there's need to be continued to assess these gaps on an ongoing basis. All right, so first to touch a little bit upon new pathways for communication. So a growing community of scientific experts are working on climate litigation, but they must learn how to communicate. So the organizations known here are just a few of the groups that are starting to do this work. So you can see it's a rapidly growing community and there's a lot of diverse voices and backgrounds that are engaging in this space. Climate litigation truly exists at the nexus of science and the law. So neither lawyers nor scientists can produce the strategic climate litigation in isolation. So a study that came from scholars here at Oxford published in Nature and Climate Change found that plaintiffs aren't using the best available scientific evidence in climate change litigation. This may point to a lack of engagement between these communities. Historically, this may have made sense, but it's time to really break down those barriers and to find safe, appropriate ways to communicate. Right now, to say there's a lack of both formal, informal and collaborative spaces for science and the law to come together. There are examples of folks that are breaking down these barriers. So you have NYU at the Climate Acceleration Lab that are starting to do communities of practice that are pulling in scientists kind of into these legal communities of practice and making sure that there's more knowledge sharing. But to inform these legal questions, again, these spaces, we need to continue to build new pathways for communications. One of the things that's important to note too is that new pathways for communication assumes that science and the law can communicate well with each other. And there's a lot of really important work to do in this area to ensure that lawyers and scientists are speaking in the same way. So just one example, scientists and lawyers are trained to approach evidence in different ways, kind of the basis of the work that both communities do. As an interdisciplinary scientist myself, I thought that I was really trained to work with any expert. My PhD program initially pulled together researchers from diverse backgrounds to tackle different tough questions, none of this training really prepared me for working with lawyers and for understanding the different language, the different communication skills, the different way that you cite when you're working on legal documents. So there's a lot of work to be done, but those skills can be learned in really powerful ways. Another quick point that I wanna make is that climate litigation relevant research is an emerging area of scientific research and it's inclusive of several different disciplinary areas. However, the scientific community must, so the scientific community must develop new skills to be able to frame research and litigation and to work within kind of normalizing these fields. So I have this image up here, which probably seems a little disconnected, but it's mostly to show that we're building this new field. There's this new approach to have litigation relevant research and it's something that we don't have to completely recreate. Folks have worked on this before in making their research more policy relevant. There's a lot of barriers that came in the beginning of policy relevant research that folks had to break down, had to learn how to communicate to new audiences, had to learn how to ask new questions, to ask questions on different time scales. We're doing that same work now for litigation relevant research. So there's a lot of opportunity in this space, but there is some reframing that needs to happen for the academic community to really thrive in this area. So the nexus of science and the law also creates a fascinating space for cross-disciplinary collaboration that can happen between science and the law. And this is a space that is really fascinating and can truly be catalytic. So climate litigation relevant research, as we've said, is an emerging area of research and it often calls on researchers to answer complex questions that exist outside the bounds of single fields. So for example, I've been in a number of rooms where people are grappling with questions around corporate emissions accountability. So to think about this, we need to be able to calculate some form of fair share analysis for companies. We need legal scholars, economists, physical scientists, historians and probably somebody who studies ethics, right? Like these are immense questions that bring together a lot of folks and really explore completely new areas. So to really dig in to what some of those areas are, I wanna highlight some of the research that we've done for research gaps. So Ben and I worked together with our colleagues, Peter Frumhoff and Jessica Wentz on doing an assessment with litigators to ask them what their research needs are, what research they're using, what gaps exist in that, where they see research needing to move forward with litigation questions that they're starting to ask. We have kind of two publications that we're working on out of this. One of them is already up. So this is a picture of a policy briefing that really digs into the nitty gritty of this research. So this is up on the website on the Climate Social Science Network report page and you can go in and you can read over a hundred research questions that came from these interviews where litigators are saying these are the questions that we need answered. These are the areas, the research areas that we expect moving forward. We have another journal article that will hopefully be coming out soon and in that we try to distill the information from these interviews as well as with other kind of informal sessions that we did, other webinar series and work from looking at the literature and from that we distill kind of these three main areas that we think are meaningful and strategic areas for research to focus on moving forward. So these are kind of the big gap areas and it doesn't always mean that they're the areas that were most mentioned by litigators but it does mean that they're the areas that kind of align with litigation, with research needs, with where things are now and where things are moving forward. So those primary areas are the climate detection and attribution which Ben talked about as a focus of some of the work in their new institute. So here it's really important to be able to establish the causal link between defendants, contributions of greenhouse gas emissions and climate harm. So that's kind of the overall reason why that's so key. Another key area which is again a very broad area is the obstruction of climate science and action. So this kind of relates back to some of the US cases that Ben was talking about as well as Total, some of these other pieces but there's really critical research that still needs to be done around obstruction and around enablers. There's broad pieces here to look at. And then finally the other key area that we identified was mitigation obligations for informing emission reductions that courts might require from governments and companies. So again, we can dig into more of this if folks are interested but these are some key areas. With this research, we outlined like 10 main research areas that were most mentioned by litigators. We have like I said, nearly I think 100 research questions that are specifically pulled out in that work that folks can look at and if anybody is interested in kind of seeing how their research might align or understanding those kind of in more depth you can reach out to us and we can help to kind of make additional connections with legal teams and with folks that are looking at that. So one of the ways to make those connections is through the program that I run which is the Science Hub for Climate Litigation. Through the Science Hub for Climate Litigation we seek to catalyze research. So we work with researchers. We have researchers in-house that are doing work that's litigation relevant. We're looking to expand the community of scientists that are engaged in climate litigation relevant research and this includes doing trainings to understand how you can be involved, to understand how your research can tie into cases. So even think through the questions that you're asking and maybe how they can be asked in different ways so that it can most benefit or most inform some potential litigation moving forward. We also work to make litigation relevant science widely available and accessible. This is critical as we move forward in this space. The audience is for our science is expanding, right? So we need to know how to talk to judges, to juries. You have to think that it could be a judge in a jury that's reading your paper someday and that could influence the outcome of the case, right? So how we're talking to new audiences, what accessibility means in this new space? So that's one area that we're working. And then finally we do work to connect legal teams with experts in relevant technical field. So if you have a specific area, if the litigators will come to us and talk about cases that they have and we work to kind of tie in and bring in experts who are interested in forming those cases. And that can look like a round table to just have a discussion with a couple of other experts and legal teams to be able to say, how are you thinking about this? Is your science robust that you're using in these cases? Or it can be as high level as to eventually be an expert witness. So there's a lot of different ways to engage. There's a lot of different variation of what that means. And it's critical that science is working to inform these decisions as we move forward. So that's what I have for today. I look forward to discussion. Thank you. Well, thank you so much to all of our brilliant panelists. And with that, I will open the floor for questions. Hi there, Cara Pike with Climate Access. I spent almost a decade as the VP of Communications at Earth Justice. And since then I've done a bunch of projects with UCS. And I'm just wondering within the community of practice and bringing people together across different disciplines, the degree to which you're involving communicators in that, because in my experience, litigation provides awesome communication opportunities, but lawyers and scientists aren't always the greatest communicators. I will take a few questions and then bring it back to our panelists. I see one right at the back. Hi, thanks for that. Gareth Edwards from the University of East Anglia. Two quick questions, mainly for Ben, I think. So the first question is, what do you define as climate litigation? I work across Australia and India, and obviously there's a lot of related litigation in India that on the surface has nothing to do with climate, but also has everything to do with climate, so around forest rights and stuff like that. And the second is the new centre that you're establishing. Where's the money from? Thanks. A good question indeed. I will take a third question from Ellen right there. Hi, great stuff. I would just love to hear more about litigation against pension funds and any other public institutions. Okay, I will hand back to the panelists who would like to take this first. Well, I guess I can start with the first question. So I guess it's heartening to hear that you feel like there are strong spaces for communicating litigation. And well, I guess to step back, you're right, scientists and litigators are not good communicators. I did a training on communication where they like had a scientist speaking, and I was like, oh, that was so strong, that was great. And they're like, that's the example of what not to do. And I was like, oh, you know. There's a lot to be learned there, and it's critical that there are communicators and campaigners that are involved in all of these discussions. And so from UCS perspective, we always have campaigners, communicators, scientists that are involved in the discussions. That's to say, there's a lot that still is a miss and needs to be learned in that space. It gets really hard, especially when you have these cases, like Ben talked about in the US that have been going on for five years. And the win that you have is that it's gonna stay in a local jurisdiction instead of moving to a federal jurisdiction. And those are really hard things to communicate as wins and to keep people excited and engaged in the space. So not only do you have the wonkiness of science, you have the wonkiness of the legal community, and then you have these processes that folks don't understand. So you're like, what's the timeline? You're like, I don't know. So there's a lot to be learned. And there's certainly need for more communicators to come into this space and to help think about how we discuss this in a public realm so that it can feel relevant and exciting to folks kind of in a broader scale. I don't know if others wanna add. Sure, yeah, I mean, public communication is clearly very important in this space. I mean, some organizations put a huge amount of effort into communicating their cases to the public as a narrative strategy, which is of course very important. So we want to make use of that. I mean, I don't know what else there is to say really, but of course it's very important. And I think there's sometimes there's a bit of a tension between the desire to get that narrative out there, because a court case itself lends itself to that sort of story, right? It's a conflict, it's a drama, and it has a resolution. So it's sort of ready-made storytelling right there. But at the same time, litigators sometimes don't want documentarians coming in and recording them when they're planning their cases and things like that. People have had bad experiences from that. So there's sometimes a tension with that. So I think it'll depend on the case, it'll depend on the type of case and the strategy for the case and so on. But of course it's extremely important. Yeah, and I guess just to add very quickly to that, it's important to know that the wins in climate litigation aren't always necessarily how you would traditionally think of a win in a court case either. So there are a lot of important narrative shifts that are happening through litigation. There's important understandings of the accountability of companies, whereas where these different things lie, and litigation plays a role in those narratives as well. So much about that is how it's communicated. So the wins in the court are key, but even some of the cases that have questioned kind of the role of subsidies that haven't necessarily gone anywhere, but they open up space for the public to think about the fossil fuel companies being subsidized and what that means. So the wins are kind of broader than just traditional court case wins as well. And another reason why communication is so important is that these cases are fundamentally about fairness, justice and empowerment, or at least they can be, or they should be, but there's the potential for them to be sort of limited in being portrayed as technocratic, highly professionalized and disconnected from everyday people, right? So that's another area where I think we need to do a better job as people involved in climate litigation in that space to communicate to the broader public why this is important and how it can be empowering. Nice. I can see there's a longer conversation specifically on climate communication. What about the other questions though? Yeah. Where's the money coming from, that's it. So far from nowhere, I'll just be honest with you, we just started, but it's gonna be an important question. And we want to avoid conflicts of interest. That's one thing I'll say that that's very important. So we do not, we plan not to accept funding from any law firms and we plan not to accept funding from any parties to litigation, to climate litigation. So that leaves government funding agencies, foundations and private sources as well. So we'll see how this goes. And I think the issue of climate litigation, sometimes litigation is sort of scary for different groups because it's something that inherently involves some conflict. So we'll see how that develops. I mean, so it's interesting because if you look back and you talk about say tobacco litigation in say the US context, now it's a no brainer. Of course, tobacco litigation was arguably didn't go far enough, but was part of the solution to dealing with that issue. Now with climate litigation, we're seeing kind of it's normalizations becoming normalized over time. So that'll play a role in that too. And how to define it. I mean, that's a really good question. That's a really good question. Sometimes you know when you see it that obviously this is climate litigation, but how do you define the boundaries of it? That's an enlightening question to examine. Is plastics litigation, climate litigation? Maybe it's deforestation or sort of what about litigation targeting animal agriculture? Maybe at the same time, if the scope is too broad then it's hard for a group like ours to maintain its focus. So that's something we're gonna have to grapple with. And obviously all of life involves prioritization. So we're gonna have to prioritize and try to have the biggest impact we can. I'd be interested, so just to say really quickly. So UCS with our climate litigation work, that's a question that we've struggled with as well. And in the beginning, I think came in and naively really thought of climate litigation as strictly kind of these large greenhouse gas and mission litigation, right? And had a pretty narrow thinking around what that was. And that often came from strategic conversations to say, how do we kind of address some of the largest emitters? How do we work with the carbon majors? Which is also where our expertise is. So it has been very much kind of focused on that space in the carbon majors. We've done a lot of learning just in the last two years since the Science Hub has existed. And for questions like petrochemicals, we hear again and again from environmental justice communities that there is no separation. And you can't kind of separate climate from the petrochemical industry. You can't kind of like have some of these artificial distinctions that exist in that. Something that's important is the graphs that were up around climate litigation, all of those spaces, there are these bigger institutes that are tracking what climate litigation is, right? So those numbers of what that increase looks like are tightly defined. And it has to, it generally ties into the greenhouse gas emissions. There's some narrow framing, although a lot of the US cases that get into Clean Air Act are included in that. Whereas a lot of greenhouse gas cases that are in the global south are just starting to be counted. So there's injustice in some ways or inconsistencies in what that counting looks like that folks are aware of and there's improvement that's happening. But yeah, kind of where those bounds are when climate change touches everything, as we all know, becomes a strategic question versus just kind of defining what climate litigation is. But I think strategically groups start to work in different areas around it, yeah. And just to add, as we heard this morning and countless other stories, there's so many examples of fossil fuel development being bound up in histories of colonization, exploitation and oppression of various groups of people. And so I think one of the areas that might develop and really should develop is litigation that is focused on restorative justice and undoing or trying to address, unfortunately can't undo it, but trying to address many of these historical injustices as well. So that might have a different flavor from the sort of litigation that targets high emitters and things like that as well. But that also arguably is climate litigation. Yeah, absolutely, you know, absolutely. And that I think will depend on jurisdiction, on the legal culture in each place and may change over time as well. For example, in the United States, five years ago when these corporate accountability suits were brought, the very first ones were dismissed pretty much outright because they were climate change cases. Now the legal culture, I think amongst judges and has changed, you know. Now they see this as an issue that can be handled by courts. So it's sort of a moving, that's sort of a moving issue for sure. Yeah, and I think sometimes in the academic verses in the like spaces like this, where we talk about climate litigation versus in the courts, those labels are very different. So a lot of infrastructure cases that you see, there's often like anti-infrastructure lawsuits that aren't arguing for emissions to be reduced, but they're arguing for them not to be in their jurisdiction for various reasons. And it's not overall an emissions reductions case, you know, but it still is often considered climate litigation in kind of overall goals, even though it's not the local legal strategy. I would like to invite some more questions now, and I would like you to keep your hand up if your question is about investment. Oh, apologies, okay, okay. Let's first hear the answer to the question about pension funds, was that correct? Yeah. Sure, and is it, will there be litigation or, yeah. I don't have anything particularly insightful to say on that, other than it's a potential area. I mean, I, you know, there could be cases that are crafted involving fiduciary duty, targeting those entities, but, you know, I can't say that I know a good strategy for addressing that, but it's certainly an important area. Targeting the investment, an area targeting the investment flows into fossil fuel development is definitely relevant to litigation, potentially. Do you have any more? You're talking specifically about pension funds, right? Yeah. Well, banks, yes, there is a lot, and there's actually a lot, a big target on them at the moment. For example, in some of the cases, there is a very recent, this is growing. So there is a very recent case where public banks have actually directly financed projects. One of the cases in Mozambique, because of course that's my case study, so that's what I'm gonna get back to you about. So the UKF has given out for, I think, 1.4 billion pounds to Mozambique Mega Project LNG in Cabo Delgado, and they were brought to court by Friends of the Earth, and they semi-won, let's say. So this is a very peculiar part of the law because this is public administration. So they brought the court, they brought the UK for judicial review to court, and out of the two judges, one said that this was against their objective for against the goals for the UK for climate change. And we're seeing a lot more of this litigation. Nowadays in banks, and especially public banks, I would say that the ones that have been targeted at the moment are mainly these ones that do credit export, and you also have some private funds and private banks. I cannot, I don't know at the moment, nothing comes to my head, but I know that there are some for funds and private funds as well that are being targeted. Okay, so I think this is a conversation for the break and maybe some scheming to happen. Can I invite questions about international investment? I will take this one here in the middle. You want one, yeah. Thank you, thanks for a great panel. I'm Jenny Stevens from Northeastern University in Boston, and my question is kind of about power dynamics and also the institutional, and we talk about science and litigation, but like who are the scientists that you're working with? And particularly, I know Ben, you and I are both very interested in the role of higher education and all of this. So even with this new center, I'm curious like why here in Oxford versus other universities that you could have this center. And then also the funding, where are, who is supporting these, litigation is so expensive and it's a power struggle, right? And we know corporate interests can usually win by throwing money at it and they win their court cases. So like who, where is the money coming from? Where is the, any insights on any of those issues would be great. I don't know if that was really about international investment, but yeah. That's okay, I'll forgive it. I'll collect a few more questions though. So many people want to ask questions. Oh yeah, Fergus, okay, you have the microphone. How convenient, thank you. Fergus Green from University College London. So I have a question for Delta and Ben. So since we're at the sort of fossil fuel supply conference, I wondered if you could say a little bit more about trends and gaps in litigation against particularly against new fossil fuel production projects. And you both sort of talked about the interdisciplinary aspect and the role of science. But particularly sort of in those cases, as you would know, there's often a lot of social scientific questions, particularly economic questions arise about the marginal effect of one project on the price, which affects consumption and so on. So one of the things I'd be sort of interested, particularly from your sort of talking to lawyers about what the gaps are, what they see as the research gaps on the social science side, particularly for that class of litigation. Thanks. And I will take a question specifically on international investment, okay, okay. I mean it. I really mean it. From this guy here in the front. Cool, thanks. My name is Florian. I'm from ETH Zurich. It is on investment. So, I mean, we've heard also in the morning a lot of weather, you know, we're going to make it into a stable climate depends on policy, right? And then of course, if you can, as a company, sue a policymaker and that impedes climate policy, that's a big problem, right? So we know that. Now, what we also know is that we're going to need a ton of investment into low carbon technologies, renewable energies, et cetera. A lot of that is going to have to happen in emerging economies. And what we know already now is that if you look at these investments, they come from abroad too. So it's nothing that is particularly to fossil fuels that makes investments in these countries coming from abroad. It's rather the institutional context of the country themselves, right? So if you build a big solar plant in Mozambique, it's also going to be financed by a lot of banks and a lot of public and private banks from Europe, from the US. So the question there is, is there a legal mechanism whereby you can actually guarantee some investor, some security, some level of certainty to the investor, depending on, let's say, the carbon footprint of the technology, or something like that. Because essentially, if you kind of get rid of all of that, then you're also going to impede renewable energy investments in a lot of these countries and we're not going to make it if that international investment doesn't flow. That's a question from a non-lawyer, of course, as you can hear. I guess we can start with that question and then move back. Actually, it's a very interesting question because this is... So what we have at the moment, so you've got different regimes now that protects investments and actually legal areas don't often communicate in between them. So even... So they said that environmental scientists and lawyers don't communicate, but also an environmental lawyer will not communicate with an investment lawyer. So already from start, we've got very different legal regimes and everybody's hyper-specialized in that. So if you do investment litigation, you know, and your objective is just to get the money and that's it. Well, if you are an environmental lawyer, it's going to be very different. So it depends which framework you're looking at. So if you're looking at investment framework, no, there is no meritocracy. Just the problem is that it protects any type of investor whatsoever. And there is... Anything that this category says that's cannot be changed? No, no, no, that can be changed. And it's actually, in my view, the global North countries that have more political and economical power that have to set the change. They have to initiate, they have the duty and the responsibility to initiate the change and doing it far better than what they are doing at the moment with the ECT or the Unstar reform process because this is just going nowhere at the moment. So they have the responsibility and the duty to reform and terminates some investment just to give you an idea. So most of the international agreements that have these investor-state dispute settlement provision are bilateral. So that means that they're in between one country and another. And for example, in the case, you've got many cases where you have like Italy and Nigeria or France and Mozambique. Of course, it is on the shoulder of countries like Italy and France to change and to, I would say, terminate this type of investment agreement or to change it and put investors' responsibility or to completely reform it so that not only investors can access it but also local population, they can access justice within this international legal justice system and their arbitration. But this is very phantascientific. Like you were talking about extra judiciary close. It's very futuristic. It would be very great but I don't think that's going to happen any time soon, let's say. And you've got other way of doing it. So for example, multilateral development banks that give subsidies can have procurement procedures within their bank to, for example, privilege and stuff financing fossil fuels. What they are doing now is that, yeah, we're investing in renewables but not enough because we still have a gap and at the same time, they're still investing in fossil fuels. So to close the gap, they could do adopt policies and procurement procedures that favorize energy investments. But yeah, if you look at the system itself, it has to be either completely changed or completely dismantled to be fair. There is no, at the moment doesn't, it protects everybody equally and actually it protects even more fossil fuel companies because of the energy, the way it's structured and because of the energy charter treaty and so on and so forth. Would any of the other panelists like to come in on that question before we move to the other ones? I just have a kind of a, sorry, a question, kind of a question on that. Is there a potential distinction between new fossil fuel projects and new clean energy projects and so far as it's foreseeable that investment in a new fossil fuel project may not be recovered ultimately because the new project may be incompatible with the stated policies of various countries that are involved in those agreements. Is there a distinction there? So it depends because it depends how the framework is set up because of course there is a difference. First of all, it only applies to foreign companies but we all know that fossil companies are global corporations that have many subsidiaries around also and if a foreign company starts an investment, it's like the Italian case says it very well like the rock hopper I was talking about. It is a new project on a concession that was given 10 years ago. They adopted this ban and Italy, for example, had already withdrew from their energy charter treaty but it has what we call a sunset close which means that for projects that were initiated before the withdrawal, it still applies. So it's about the temporalities. When do you start? When did the country withdraw? So it's already late. They should have already withdrawn from the start of investments, agreements. If they are no longer, and so that's why they were still protected. Let's say that now if they start a new project that goes against this ban, they will now, that they have already withdrawn, they will not be able to rely on the energy charter treaty because it was only on projects that were before. So there is the possibility but concessions for exploration and extraction usually are 25 to 30 years. So even anything that has been done in the last 10 years as a lifetime now so this is where we, it's already late, we should have acted. And countries should come together to terminate or to take at least to get rid of investor state dispute settlement closing agreements. We have just a couple of minutes left. So let's address the questions that we heard and then we can wrap up. Do you want to start on the paradigm next one? Sure. Yeah, I mean, climate litigation clearly challenges very powerful interests, right? You know, I think this is one reason why at many law clinics around the United States at least they don't do corporate accountability litigation because it challenges powerful interests. So you do need an institution that is willing to walk into that space. So, you know, I kind of want us, not trying to suck up to Oxford, but I give Oxford great credit for doing this, for supporting this. What else? In a bit, yeah, go ahead. Just to add to that a little bit, I think some of the other power dynamics that exist, you have the corporate kind of power dynamics in that litigation and governments, but there also are really important power dynamics for kind of who's respected in both these spaces, right? So you have the scientific community, which is historically very white, very male, like you, then you have the legal community, which often looks, kind of values the types of pieces of the academic community that require seniority, right? So it's the, if you're, you publish in the IPCC, if you've got, you know, like there's, which I guess that's not, but for its older academics, it's often, and can kind of recreate these same power dynamics where you then rely on kind of the old guard of the academia, because that's who the judge is gonna respect the most in that space. And it can really create closed doors and prevent important voices and studies from getting into it. It's not easy, cause another part of it is that as we've seen or talked about a little bit, is it's not an incredibly well-funded movement around climate litigation. So a lot of times when we're asking academics to engage us on a volunteer basis, right? So then it's also often that you wanna go to the folks who kind of have benefited from the systems and have resources for it so that their time can be used in different ways, right? So I think there's a lot of power dynamics of how voices are included, where that means how there's compensation, and there's certainly efforts to be figuring out how there's compensation for experts for scientists who are engaging in this space that can equitably bring in new voices. And you can see, I mean the successes, again, like there's important critiques that this is coming out of, that climate litigation is coming out of Europe and the US and that it's coming out of major institutions, and there's important wins that we saw this morning that are coming out of communities, that aren't in the Ivy Leagues and aren't embedded in all of that, and those are important lessons learned, right? And there's actually energy in those movements versus some of the top-down litigation that is very important and very strategic, but has no community basis, right? And it's difficult to engage community in, especially like in the US cases, it's mostly governments that are suing corporations, right? So most communities aren't really engaged or there's not a lot of buy-in or trust with government, so they're not buying into that litigation to really involve in it or have their time. It's different than kind of the human rights-based litigation that's coming out of the, most of the rest of the world. But so that's not a great answer to the question, but there's a lot to struggle with there and kind of to the second piece of it, I think that there is kind of need for different funding mechanisms because it doesn't, I think litigation, which Ben can speak to more, but you kind of assume that there's funding on the end of it, especially if you're working on like impact litigation where there's potential for mitigation and money. And yeah, so those dynamics look a lot different. Can I add quickly something to that question? Because actually in investment arbitration, there is a very interesting phenomenon that's called third-party funding. So when mega-corporations that already have the liquidity to start an arbitration, but let's say they're a little bit smaller, and this is a recurrent thing. There are people that start arbitration on purpose just to get third-party funding because what happens is that they say, oh, we're gonna litigate against this and because they have the best lawyers, the system is more in favor of them, et cetera, they have good odds of winning. So they start looking for funders and with the promise that if they win, they will get a share of that. And third-party funders are often not disclosed. We don't know who's financing these claims, but these companies are financed in the back by all these companies. I want to take a little bit of the profit out of these litigations, I guess, state. And then in just like a sentence for the other question around social science, I'd love to connect more on that. From the research that Ben and I and others conducted, the majority of the questions that they're asking are social science questions. So we think of climate litigation in the physical science space. Most of the physical science of actual climate science isn't being contested in the courts right now. There's some fear that in some of the US courts, it might be in the future, but right now, globally, folks understand that climate change is real. That's not what's being contested. In a lot of the lawsuits, it's the social science piece that's really bringing in the litigation and is key to it and the economics, those pieces are the foundations for most of them. We do expect that there'll be a lot, some of the physical science around attribution, those pieces that'll come in and be really key kind of in the later stages. And when we're looking at remedies and those potential things that they'll come back in and be essential to cases as they move forward. But when you look at the science that's actually presented in the cases now, it's IPCC, it's a lot of those pieces. And there's a ton of social science. And the litigators that we talked to, the majority of the questions that were asked and the gaps that were identified were within the social science area. And I, oh, sorry. I hate to break up this conversation, but we are keeping everyone from lunch. And I think everyone at lunch will have a lot to talk about because of this. So I would just like to invite a round of applause for our really excellent panelists.