"Climate litigation is not just growing — it’s snowballing," writes The Daily Upside. However, international courts have been slow to catch up. Dr Ben Franta of the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme comments: “It’s a well-known challenge [with] international courts: Because they don’t have independent police power, they must persuade member states to comply with their orders.”
For the first time, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that weak government climate policies violate fundamental human rights. Research co-authored by the Sustainable Law Programme was cited in the final judgement in favour of the KlimaSeniorinnen.
Academics at the University of Oxford have called for rigorous net zero ‘ground rules’ – encompassing laws, regulation and policy – to be implemented and enforced across the world, in an article published in Nature Climate Change today.
Lawyers and scientists including leading academics from the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme called for the International Criminal Court to actively engage in addressing environmental degradation and destruction. They noted that human activities leading to severe environmental harm often violate human rights, and so could be treated in the same as way as crimes such as genocide or crimes against humanity.
Lake Palcacocha is at increased risk of bursting its banks and flooding the town of Huaraz below it, because of climate change, reports the The Guardian. The article cites research led by Dr Rupert Stuart-Smith, which concluded that human-caused climate change has shrunk the glacier which feeds the lake, in turn raising the water to dangerous levels.
Companies and regulators are waking up to potential threats from climate litigation, but have only just begun to grapple with how these risks should be evaluated, states Environmental Analyst in a report on new research by the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme.
Lawyers and scientists, including Maud Sarliève, Dr Rupert Stuart-Smith and Associate Professor Thom Wetzer from the Oxford Sustainable Law programme, have called for the International Criminal Court to actively engage in addressing environmental degradation and destruction.
Thom Wetzer, Associate Professor of Law and Finance and Director of the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme, guest edited the European Corporate Governance Institute’s latest Blog Review. Titled “Governance & Climate Change,” the Review explores the “pivotal questions that boardrooms across the globe will have to address in the years ahead.”
Dr Thom Wetzer commented on the rise of climate lawsuits and the risks these post to investors in The National. "The more money that flows in, the more likely the litigation is to be professionally organised and the more likely it will succeed. And the more these cases succeed, the more money comes in … It’s a flywheel,” he said.
The Net Zero Regulation and Policy Hub aims to meet the enormous ‘implementation gap’ between the net zero targets that governments and companies have set, and the policies and actions needed to deliver them, and is co-led by Dr Thom Wetzer.