Cities around the U.S. have long demonstrated leadership on climate change, with more than 170 of them having set targets to phase out fossil energy and many others committing to net zero greenhouse gas emissions. American cities, towns, counties, and other forms of local government have pioneered path-setting approaches to economy-wide […]
By Matthias Petel and Antoine De Spiegeleir * VZW Klimaatzaak v. Kingdom of Belgium & Others is a climate lawsuit brought in Belgium in 2015 modelled on the famous Dutch Urgenda case. In this groundbreaking judicial procedure, plaintiffs argued that Belgian public authorities have undertaken insufficient climate action and called […]
by Korey Silverman-Roati Introduction After an extra year’s delay and a summer of climate change-induced disasters, the 26th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP26) entered its second week on Monday. I attended the first week volunteering with the organization Legal Response International (LRI) […]
By Romany M. Webb On Tuesday, November 2, the Biden administration unveiled a suite of measures aimed at controlling methane emissions from oil and natural gas facilities. Key among those measures are new emissions controls proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under section 111 of the Clean Air Act. […]
Chelsea Gómez joined the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law in October 2021 and serves as a Graduate Research Assistant supporting research on City Focus Groups on Climate and Equity-based Policies. Chelsea is currently a Master of Public Administration candidate focusing in Environmental Science and Policy at the School for […]
By Maria Antonia Tigre On September 20, 2021, the German environmental organization Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH) filed two actions against the automakers BMW and Mercedes-Benz for refusing to tighten their carbon emissions target and stop producing fossil fuel fuel-emitting cars by 2030 (DUH v. BMW and DUH v. Mercedes-Benz). The […]
By Maria Antonia Tigre The last few days saw two major developments in international rights-based climate litigation, with the adoption of a new resolution by the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) and a long-awaited decision on a climate case by the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC). […]
By Jessica Wentz, The IPBES Global Assessment on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (2019) estimated that approximately one million species are currently at risk of extinction, with climate change being a major driver of accelerating extinction risk. Global average temperatures have risen by more than 1°C above pre-industrial levels and we […]