BIICL Webinar Series "Rising Sea Levels: Promoting Climate Justice through International Law" Online 3 - 24 March 2021
"Rising Sea Levels: Promoting Climate Justice through International Law"
Registration is free.
Series Overview
Low-lying coastal regions and island nations, are directly susceptible to threats posed by global warming and concomitant rise in sea levels. Many of those nations are small island developing states largely depending on fishing and tourism for their economic survival. Rising sea levels present a unique threat to the territorial integrity of those coastal states, to their coastal communities, their oceanic resources, and, indeed, to their continuous statehood. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has noted, climate change will affect the physical territory of states in a number of ways, such as the loss of viable ecosystems due to desertification, increased soil salinity, flooding of coastal and low-lying regions or loss of reliable access to land due to increased severe weather events such as hurricanes and tsunami. (IPCC, The Physical Science Basis: Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007)). However, these small island States also often have the least capacity, financing, or political support for mitigation and adaptation initiatives.
In this seminar series, we will be looking at rising sea levels as a global problem and the legal issues arising from it from the lens of international law and climate justice. What can we do in international law to improve things for now and for future generations? Is climate litigation the key? Would an ICJ advisory opinion help to strengthen the Paris Agreement?
This webinar series is convened by Dr Constantinos Yiallourides, Arthur Watts Research Fellow on the Law of the Sea, BIICL
