A Right to Defend the Environment: Legal Protection for Environmental Advocacy in the IACtHR’s Climate Advisory Opinion

As the world faces an escalating triple planetary crisis  – climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution – those who step forward to defend the environment are increasingly stigmatized, criminalized, and subjected to violence. Nowhere is this threat more acute than in Latin America, which accounts for nearly 80% of all […]

Epistemic Authority and the Right to Science in AO-32/25: Legal Foundations for the Integration of Traditional Knowledge in the Inter-American System

Among the various legal instruments aimed at protecting human rights in the face of the climate emergency, few require as much interpretative effort as the right to science. Traditionally situated within the realm of programmatic obligations and often associated with promoting technical progress and disseminating scientific information, this right has occupied a […]

The Evasion of Historical Responsibility? Colonialism, Temporality and Reparative Justice in the ICJ’s Climate Advisory Opinion

The International Court of Justice’s (ICJ’s) advisory opinion on Obligations of States in Respect of Climate Change has been celebrated as marking the start of a “new era of climate reparations.” The question of how the ICJ engaged with reparations has already been examined in two other posts in this […]

Court of Appeals Sets Aside Preliminary Injunction in GGRF Litigation

This is Part Two of a two-part blog series that examines the impact of federal grant termination litigation on the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF). Part One, which covers recent Supreme Court orders that have shaped the D.C. Circuit’s consideration of the GGRF case, can be accessed […]

Reviewing Energy Transition Ratios: the Reliable, Revealing, and Risky

    This blog is the second in a three-part series on sustainable finance metrics that better evaluate corporate climate risk, opportunity, and impact, and make metrics more relevant to financial decision-making. In the last decade, financial market participants have begun to grapple with the risk and opportunity posed by […]

“Doing the utmost”: Due diligence as the standard of conduct in international climate law

One of the most profound findings in the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ’s) climate change advisory opinion (AO) is that State obligations to mitigate climate change to a level that holds warming to the Paris Agreement’s 1.5oC threshold are spread out over the large canvas of international law, including United […]

Victims’ Rights, Redress and Accountability for the Climate Crisis: Lessons from Transitional Justice

The climate reparations debate seeks justice for states, communities, and individuals suffering from the unjust distribution of climate-related harms. This debate can be usefully informed by lessons from the field of ‘transitional justice’, i.e., the body of scholarship and practice concerned with how societies respond to the legacies of massive […]

Supreme Court Signals Challenges to Federal Grant Terminations are Contract Disputes

*This is Part One of a two-part blog series that examines the impact of federal grant termination litigation on the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF). At the time of this post, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has just issued a decision in Climate […]