It was a privilege to have the opportunity to do a podcast on Climate Change Law with Sarah Kazmi, Barrister for the Bar at Law podcast, aimed at young Pakistani lawyers and law students.

We discussed my first proper introduction to climate change law when visiting UNEP in Nairobi in 1991, and discussing the worldwide satellite data coming into the Global Environment Monitoring Service. The scientists there told me that they were completely convinced that the evidence pointed to man-made global warming, their only question then being how far and how fast it would happen. Now we are finding out the hard way how right they were.

We talked about the international law frameworks that lawyers needed to know about, and the way in which this fed into national legislation and regulation, such as Pakistan’s first NDC in 2016, updated in 2021, and its Climate Change Act of 2017.

We discussed the UK’s Climate Change Act of 2008, with its net zero target, 5 yearly carbon budgets, and independent Committee on Climate Change publishing regular progress reports to Parliament.

I suggested the need for lawyers to be open to learning about the basic science of climate change, such as the IPCC reports, including the IPCC Sixth Assessment Synthesis Report 2023, the news of tipping points such as the reports from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and the regular updates on atmospheric CO2 levels from the NOAA Mauna Loa Observatory and the famous Keeling curve – in June 2023, these levels were 423.68 p.p.m.

Climate change was already relevant to almost every aspect of law that we could think of – laws on agriculture, real estate, land use planning, building and construction, transport, energy and the energy transition, adaptation and climate resilience, health care, education, finance (with instruments like the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure), city governance.

We covered some of the trends in climate litigation, such as the climate litigation against Shell, fiduciary duties for directors, and the way that the science of climate attribution was advancing.

And finally we discussed some of the work we are doing through our climate website at www.COP26andbeyond.com currently working on a film on Biodiversity and Climate Change, aiming to put together a dashboard of readily accessible resources on climate and biodiversity, and preparing to support young climate activists in the run up to COP28. This summer we are lucky to have Zainab Zahid working as in Intern on all of that and more, Nouman Alam researching disaster preparedness in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Maria Samiwala researching sustainable cities issues in Karachi.

There is a link to the podcast here –

🎶 Tune in to the Bar at Law Podcast on any audio platform now

https://lnkd.in/dGuZcaab

And a link to our climate newsletter here –

https://www.cop26andbeyond.com/contact-us

Further Resources

IPPC Reports

https://www.ipcc.ch

Climate Litigation – Sabin Centre for Climate Change Law, Columbia University -

https://climate.law.columbia.edu

Climate Laws of the World - Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/grantham/

Tipping Points – Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research –