Climate Change and the Law

Climate change has emerged as one of the major concerns influencing policy making and the law at the global, regional and national level. The course is divided into three parts.

The first part of the course will provide an introduction to International Law and EU Law, including the principles of international environmental law of importance to climate change law and the sustainable development goals. Moreover, the international climate change regime will be outlined and discussed, which includes the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Kyoto Protocol and the Doha Amendment. Very importantly, the Paris Agreement is examined in depth, paying attention to the adaptation, mitigation (including the issue of carbon markets) and financial aspects that need to be developed and implemented in the forthcoming years. Thus, students will in addition to the legal framework
get familiarised with negotiations and outcomes of post 2012 and post 2020 commitments.

The second part of the course will focus on the EU regime on climate change. It will mainly cover the EU competences and international commitments regarding climate change, the legislation on greenhouse gases and its relationship with other environmental legislation. In particular, this part will focus on the EU emissions trading scheme (EU ETS) and the regulation of non- ETS sectors, including climate-related case law. As the cornerstone of the EU climate policy, a significant efforts will be put into getting the student acquaintance with the EU ETS as a model for other jurisdictions.

The third part will focus on sectoral aspects of climate change and the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions in venues outside the climate regime and the interaction with it. This includes the case of international aviation and maritime transport where specifically a comprehensive international legal framework for controlling maritime greenhouse gas emissions has proven a
challenging task whereas several regulatory initiatives have been taken with respect to reducing emissions from the aviation sector. Crucially, this third part will also deal with the energy sector as the major contributor to climate change. Addressing climate change is very much a matter of addressing energy use as the use of fossil fuels is the dominant anthropogenic cause of global warming. The focus of the third part will be the legal challenges caused by the need to substitute fossil fuels by various alternatives (renewables, biofuels, nuclear, new forms of carbon fuels and fusion and clean coal technologies), the need for efficiency and energy savings, and the potential to render traditional carbon based consumption ‘clean’ by extracting the CO2 for storage.

The course builds upon the MA education by applying legal methodology within the specialised area of climate change adaptation and mitigation that includes both international and EU law aspects. This means that the students are requested to understand, identify, analyze and solve legal issues and questions in a complex political and legal setting that involves actors and regulatory frameworks at many levels.

The course does not require that students have followed any specific courses beforehand but it is advantagerous to have some knowledge of international law, international environmental law and EU law.