A few days ago, the Obama administration announced plans to create a new Climate Service within NOAA. The new Climate Service will initially concentrate on making climate science information more accessible and usable. This strikes me as an eminently sensible plan that will both increase efficiency of governmental study of climate change and, hopefully, help [...]
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PBS Frontline & the Center for Investigative Reporting have launched a website linking to a variety of interviews, program segments and reports touching on some key issues emerging in carbon markets. The materials are accessible and well-crafted, making them very suitable to provide students’ with an introduction to issues such as REDD’s potential impacts on [...]
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Last week Wil Burns commented on the “climate-gate” controversy noting that it is an important issue because “perception can be reality.” A couple of recent news articles shed a bit of light on just how important this may be. The Washington Post reports poll results showing that “four in 10 Americans now saying that they place [...]
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AP reports that talks over REDD are faltering because developed countries are not willing to finance developing country readiness for the program. This is not surprising since financing disputes have repeatedly limited the development of international environmental law. The significance of financing disputes are nowhere more apparent than in the history of efforts to secure a [...]
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AP published an article today reporting on its review over 1,000 emails related to the so-called “climate-gate scandal.” For the article, five AP reporters read (and re-read) the roughly 1 million words in the emails “for context.” The conclusions are not likely to surprise those of us who spend much of our working lives thinking about climate change policy: science addressing issues with deep social [...]
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A recent study by 12 authors from governmental, academic and non-governmental organizations highlights what may be at stake in cases such as Stop the Beach Renourishment v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection (being argued before the US Supreme Court on Wednesday, Dec. 2) and Severance v. Patterson.
In addition to the article reporting the study, the researchers [...]
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The European Tropical Forest Research Network (ETFRN) recently released a report titled “Forests and Climate Change: adaptation and mitigation.” Among other things, the report highlights the importance of ensuring that adaptation be considered in the mechanism addressing reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) likely to be a part of a post-Kyoto agreement. As I’ve said previously [...]
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Students who are skeptical of the basic climate science present one of the more persistent problems I find when attempting to integrate climate change considerations into environmental law survey courses. In a more in-depth course, we can take the time to spend a couple of classes exploring the supposed “debate” and educate students about the [...]
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A new report prepared under the auspices of the Convention on Biological Diversity examines the relationship of biodiversity, forest resilience, and climate change. Stated simply, maintenance of biodiversity is important to forest resilience in most forest types. Resilience, in turn, provides a metric for understanding the likely permanence of carbon sequestration and storage in forests.
This [...]
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When introducing climate change issues and politics in both domestic and international environmental law classes, I have found segments from two PBS Frontline episodes useful to set context. Both videos are available online in convenient “chapters” to facilitate use of brief (6 to 12 minute) segments that can be worked into a lecture or discussion. The [...]
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