Environmental Law Changing

Environmental law has expanded rapidly over the past four decades and now encompasses concerns ranging from air and water quality to the decontamination of hazardous waste sites and the protection of biodiversity. One of the most recent specialties to be studied in law schools is climate change, a complex field that many schools are now starting to explore.

There are two principal difficulties, says Professor Michael B. Gerrard, Director of the Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School: “First, an extraordinarily large number of different areas of law are involved.

“Second, developments are occurring so quickly at the administrative, legislative and judicial branches that it is challenging to keep up with them all and to integrate them in a unified picture of what is happening.”

The scope and complexity of the climate change debate makes it very challenging to design a curriculum around it, said Patrick Parenteau, Professor of Law at the Vermont Law School.

“It is multi-disciplinary, demanding a solid grasp of science, economics, technology, land use, ethics, domestic law, international law and many other subjects. There is a huge volume of literature to digest,” Professor Parenteau said. “There are still huge uncertainties in the science regarding the speed with which changes are happening and the consequences of climate change at various spatial scales.

“The law is still emerging so there is a huge amount of uncertainty about the shape that it will ultimately take.”

Climate change will require massive transformations of every economic sector, led by energy and transportation. “That in turn requires an understanding of how laws in these sectors currently work and how they must be changed. On top of all this are the domestic political considerations and the trade and equity issues between developed and developing worlds,” Mr. Parenteau added.

Students of climate change law are facing a steep learning curve as they familiarize themselves with climate science. To understand the laws and policy they must first achieve some carbon literacy — an understanding of the sources and effects of the main greenhouse gases. This takes both time and critical thinking, said Professor Michael P. Vandenbergh, director of an interdisciplinary climate change research network at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee.

“For example, stating that a company or country aims to achieve 20 percent emissions’ reductions by 2020 tells us very little about their actual commitment,” Professor Vandenbergh said in a written commentary. “We need to know whether the emissions are for just CO2 or CO2 equivalent (all six leading greenhouse gases); what the baseline year is (1990, 2000, 2005), since emissions have been going up each year and a later baseline year implies less stringent cuts; and what the business-as-usual emissions would have been in the absence of cuts.”

European universities have been leading the charge to teach this new specialty. “E.U. universities are ahead of U.S. institutions simply because the E.U. has been dealing with the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, while we have been on the sidelines looking on,” said Mr. Parenteau.

Still, some U.S. law schools are now engaging with climate change: Pace Law School in New York started this year to offer a climate change track in its environmental law masters program, the first U.S. university to do so.

The Pace program features six specially developed courses: Climate adaptive management; climate and insurance; climate and corporate practice; climate change practice; disaster law and emergency preparedness; and state and regional climate initiatives.

It also offers students a chance to participate in one of the school’s signature programs — the Environmental Diplomacy Externship at the United Nations, in which students work two days a week at the United Nations with delegations and environmental agencies providing legal and policy support on climate change and sustainability issues.

The Rest @ The New York Times