How to Do Things with Climate Reparations

Anne Orford is Melbourne Laureate Professor and Michael D Kirby Chair of International Law at Melbourne Law School. During 2024, Professor Orford has been appointed by the Swedish Research Council as the Olof Palme Visiting Professor at Stockholm University, to conduct a project on the securitization of climate change. We are delighted that she will be visiting the Amsterdam Law School on Tuesday 12 November.

As climate change has increasingly come to be seen as an urgent global problem, there has been a turn to international law for solutions. The resulting involvement of international lawyers in developing responses to climate change in an unequal world has been a deeply contested project. The debate over whether, when, and by whom reparations should be paid for climate-related loss and damage has been a central part of that contest.  At stake is a question that goes to the heart of the global political economy: who should bear the social costs of industrialization on a global scale, including those associated with climate change? The discussion of climate reparations often seems to treat international law as intervening only if it is used to redistribute such costs. Yet to ask whether international law should develop a liability regime for climate loss and damage ignores the fact that international law has already developed such a regime. International law has been central to allocating the increasingly transboundary costs of industrialization since the 1940s. This talk will aim to make visible the ways in which legal decisions taken in different sites over that period have collectively contributed to allocating the costs of carbon-intensive industrialization away from polluters and on to the states and peoples most vulnerable to the immediate effects of climate change.

Registration: https://uvaforms.formstack.com/forms/anne_orford
Additional information: https://www.uva.nl/en/shared-content/subsites/amsterdam-center-for-international-law/en/events/2024/11/anne-orford.html