 I'm delighted to be joined this morning by Dr Marcus Gehring, who is a university lecturer in Sustainable Development Law and International and European Law, and you teach European Environmental Law and Sustainable Development. So Marcus, could you define for me your field of expertise? What is it and why exactly does it matter? So, thank you very much for having me. I'm researching and teaching European Environmental and Sustainable Development Law and have been for the last 15 years. My main interest is in looking at the regulation on the environment at the European and at the international level and to explore their interactions. So, I'm also the cosconvina for the Year External Relations course for that matter. The field has been evolving. So, it's a very new field of law. We've had been discussing environmental protection issues really seriously at the international level since 1972 and sustainable development issues since 1990 to the Rio Earth Summit. European law has really developed in tandem with the international level. It used to be the case that a lot of innovations in environmental law came from the United States, which was the first country to adopt a Clean Air Act and to adopt various other statutes on the protection of the environment. But in the last 15 to 20 years that global leadership has actually changed. Nowadays the most innovative instruments actually come from the European Union level, which is not very surprising because in a way you're not developing these rules completely in a vacuum. There are countries within the European Union that have a long history of environmental protection and these countries bring their best practices to the European level and then jointly European Union countries decide to adopt these rules. Okay, so what is the EU's contribution being? What are some of the major impacts of EU policy in this field? Yeah, this is a really interesting development because sometimes the European Union is accused of being a really ideological kind of project, but on the environmental law side that is really not the case. The first rules at the European Union level developed out of a necessity because Member States realised that if they wanted to protect say an animal, a bird species or nature, the environment in general, they couldn't do that without a certain level of cooperation from their neighbours. So the first directive was the bird's directive, besides waste directives and more economically related directives, but the first real environmental directive was the bird's directive because especially the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, two nations that really value their bird life and have large groups of enthusiasts who go bird watching and really protect birds realise that some of the migratory birds weren't coming back and that was due to very different levels of bird protection laws across the European Union. So the European community at the time decided that they really needed common rules in order to reach the protection objectives that were promoted in countries like the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. So they adopted this law on the basis of harmonisation legislation and it's still one of the most effective directives that we have for the protection of wild birds. Then we issued a couple of times and it creates basically special bird protection zones so that migratory birds, regardless of their flight routes, are no longer in danger of, for example, being hunted or faced with other environmental challenges. So it comes from a realisation that when actually in Europe living in a shared environmental space we need the cooperation of other countries and a problem such as climate change is in effect a shared environmental problem. So to have common rules at the European level makes good sense because at the same time we're operating in a single market so we do want a level playing field but that also means that if you have vastly different environmental protection laws you might actually put your own economic sector at a disadvantage and that's also not the objective. So it's rather than thinking oh this is all ideological that we protect the environment, it makes your own rules much more efficient and that's the main driver for your environmental law in my view. I suppose migratory birds and air quality don't respect national borders or the Schengen agreement? No absolutely not right so you will easily realise that if you want to achieve an environmental quality outcome and your neighbour really doesn't care or doesn't have similar approaches to the same problem you will get nowhere right and we're faced with this at the international level but we've come a much further away within the European continent. So what do you think that the impact of a Brexit of a vote to leave would be in your field? Yeah that's a good question. I don't think anyone has a decisive answer. I know as I said on the previous point that we need to collaborate with our neighbours even as an island nation we need the buy-in if you want from other countries so we need to cooperate with our European neighbours. If you want to achieve any environmental protection outcomes of course, if we wanted to leave the European Union and then get rid of all the environmental protection laws that would be the only possibility then probably all our neighbours would complain about our own behaviour and that would lead to international disputes. I think realistically at least for the environmental field just like Norway, just like Switzerland many of the far reaching environmental directives and regulations such as the carbon emission trading directive or the reach directive on chemicals will continue to be enforced and will be updated and adopted even post Brexit because those are also some of the laws that our neighbourhood corporation partners in the east and our North African partners often subscribe to. So in other words even if you are outside the European Union the thought that you wouldn't have to comply with any of the environmental rules set by that body is in my view completely illusionary. Rather we would lose a lot of impact on the development of these rules and they are often very very technical pieces of legislation so it matters whether you have an exception for an issue that you feel very strongly about in the fifth annex. But if you're not sitting around the negotiation table it's very hard to get those kind of issues into the directive. The Norwegians are on the receiving end participating to largest end in the internal market so they often have to bag their Swedish, Finnish and Danish EU member state partners among the Nordic countries. To please also bring the Norwegian issue to the table, I don't think that would be a very comfortable position for the United Kingdom to be in because I think the devil is often with these rules is in the detail and if for lack of compliance with environmental rules entire industries of the UK would be shut out of the internal market I think that would be a miserable outcome. So there's almost negotiation by proxy in some circumstances. Exactly. So that's what my Norwegian friends tell me it's very uncomfortable. Yes you're an independent nation, yes you care about environmental protection but you're not really at the negotiation table and you're not there for the 11th hour when the last minute deals are made. And whether we like it or not the EU is also about negotiation it's about co-collaboration with your European partners and if you're just on the outside you're not part of that inner negotiation. So is there one key message or fact that you would like to be communicated more clearly as part of the referendum debate in your field? I think what is important is that the United Kingdom already has a lot of international obligations that we're not going to share regardless whether the United Kingdom is a member state of the European Union or not. But making this work in a way that is efficient and really effective for environmental protection objectives is just easier and more straightforward if we are part of the European Union. However if your objective is to really scale down on environmental protection, if you really don't care about the quality of your air or the quality of your drinking water then you might vote in favour of leaving the European Union. Sometimes the argument is made, oh if we were not part of the European Union we could have much stronger environmental laws. Well there's a specialty in EU law because the environment is one of those fields where you can always have stronger environmental protection rules. So if you wanted much stronger environmental protection rules in the United Kingdom you could already do that under the EU treaties. I haven't seen the United Kingdom doing that in the last 25 years so I wouldn't expect them to suddenly become the world champion on environmental protection laws outside the European Union. On the other hand I've seen the United Kingdom contributing in a very direct fashion to the development of EU environmental law. For example the integrated, the IPPC directive, the integrated pollution and prevention control directive is a piece of legislation that was first trialled in the United Kingdom. This integrated thinking that you shouldn't move one area of pollution to another so you shouldn't move air pollution to water pollution to ground soil pollution is a direct innovation that was introduced into EU law by the British negotiators. And I think there are many more examples where Britain has actually been fantastic for environmental protection objectives all over the European Union and I would hate to lose that kind of influence. Thank you very much for speaking to us today. Thank you.