How to Do Things with Climate Reparations
- Date
- 12 November 2024
- Time
- 16:00 -17:30
- Location
- Roeterseilandcampus - building A
- Room
- A3.01
Abstract:
As climate change has increasingly come to be seen as an urgent global problem, there has been a turn to international law for solutions. The resulting involvement of international lawyers in developing responses to climate change in an unequal world has been a deeply contested project. The debate over whether, when, and by whom reparations should be paid for climate-related loss and damage has been a central part of that contest. At stake is a question that goes to the heart of the global political economy: who should bear the social costs of industrialization on a global scale, including those associated with climate change? The discussion of climate reparations often seems to treat international law as intervening only if it is used to redistribute such costs. Yet to ask whether international law should develop a liability regime for climate loss and damage ignores the fact that international law has already developed such a regime. International law has been central to allocating the increasingly transboundary costs of industrialization since the 1940s. This talk will aim to make visible the ways in which legal decisions taken in different sites over that period have collectively contributed to allocating the costs of carbon-intensive industrialization away from polluters and on to the states and peoples most vulnerable to the immediate effects of climate change.
Bio:
Anne Orford is Melbourne Laureate Professor and Michael D Kirby Chair of International Law at Melbourne Law School, and Visiting Professor of Law and John Harvey Gregory Lecturer on World Organization at Harvard Law School. She researches and teaches in the areas of international law, international dispute settlement, international economic law, climate change, and the history and theory of international law. She is a Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and has been a Visiting Legal Fellow at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and an international expert adviser on climate change and international law to the Pacific Islands Forum. Her latest book, International Law and the Politics of History (Cambridge University Press, 2021), was awarded the 2022 European Society of International Law Monograph Prize for Excellence in International Law Scholarship. She is currently the 2024 Olof Palme Visiting Professor at Stockholm University, where she is researching the securitization of climate change.
