Simon Nicholson

Jumping on the Human Rights Bandwagon: How Rights-based Linkages Can Refocus Climate Politics

This paper makes a normative argument for the greater strategic utilization of human rights institutions, practices, and discourses by those seeking a robust response to climate change. Bandwagoning between these two regimes is hardly a new thing. The environmental movement has long looked to the human rights movement for ideas and support, and vice versa. Here, we argue that there is potential for even more explicit bandwagoning in ways that will most directly benefit those who are suffering, and will continue to suffer, from climate changes greatest impacts. The human rights framework offers a guide to more effective climate action via two interconnected arenas: a legal arena that provides an established set of tools for climate activists, and a political arena that provides a normative underpinning for a range of judicial and non-judicial actions in support of ‘climate justice.’ Ultimately, moral and strategic guidance from the human rights movement points the way to a more equitable and enduring climate politics, with fairness at its heart.

Justice is the goal: divestment as climate change resistance

This article takes a sympathetic look at the university fossil fuel divestment movement. The push for divestment is changing the conversation about what “sustainability” means for college campuses. It is also generating a new, more critical and politically engaged cadre of climate activists. We use a shared auto-ethnographic approach from student activists’ and professors’ perspectives to analyze the campus divestment movement based on the experience of American University’s Fossil Free AU campaign. We argue that this issue is one where sustainability politics are re-politicized as they challenge traditional power relations and conceptualizations of what environmentalism entails. The case study explores how a climate justice framework, radical perspectives, and inside/outsider strategies were used within the campaign. We argue that the campus fossil fuel divestment movement holds potential to change the university’s expressed values from complicity with fossil fuel economies toward an emergent paradigm of climate justice, stemming predominantly from student activism. The work presents new vantage points for understanding the relationship of personal experience, local campaigns of ecological resistance, and sustainability politics more broadly.

Solar radiation management: a proposal for immediate polycentric governance

ABSTRACT The stringency of the 1.5 degree goal under the Paris Agreement, coupled with the mismatch between that goal and domestic mitigation pledges, inevitably directs attention onto the potential future role of solar radiation management (SRM) technologies. Such technologies, however, remain controversial, and analysis of their environmental, social and ethical implications is at an early stage. In this context, this paper distils four key governance objectives and proposes three specific policy interventions for the near-term governance of SRM technologies. Specifically, we build from existing literature to argue that SRM governance must simultaneously: guard against the risks of uncontrolled SRM development; enable potentially valuable research; build legitimacy for research and any future policy through broad public engagement and ensure that SRM is only considered as one part of a broader mitigation agenda. We propose three interventions to work towards those objectives in the near term by: developing a transparency mechanism for research; creating a global forum for public engagement and including consideration of SRM in the global stocktake under the Paris Agreement. Finally, we argue that carrying out these interventions requires a shared or ‘polycentric’ SRM governance structure that can build on the site-specific capabilities and preferences of existing international institutions. Key policy insights Despite their highly controversial nature, large-scale technological interventions, such as solar radiation management (SRM), must be considered (albeit possibly rejected) for their potential contribution towards meeting the 1.5 degree target established under the Paris Agreement. Existing governance mechanisms for SRM need further development to ensure that unnecessary threats to social and/or natural systems are not incurred. There are at least three governance mechanisms that should be pursued immediately to protect against some of these potential threats, including: a transparency mechanism for SRM research, a global forum to facilitate public engagement and incorporating evaluation of SRM technologies into the global stocktake under the Paris Agreement.

The Promises and Perils of Geoengineering

Over the last handful of years, a set of radical ideas that have long been confined to the fringes of climate change discussions have begun to edge toward center stage. The ideas are known collectively as geoengineering proposals—sweeping technological schemes designed to counteract the effects of planetary warming. (See Box 29–1 for a full definition.)1

The Birth of Free-Market Environmentalism

Around the world, particularly in the United States, debates about environmental protection have become ever-more fractious and polarized, following a radical shift in the collective understanding of environmental challenges and the appropriate responses to them. Whereas in the 1970s and the 1980s, environmental protection took the form of government-led action and intergovernmental treaty making, today it comes primarily under the heading of market capitalism and technological optimism. Sabin’s The Bet traces the growing politicization of, and free-market triumphalism around, environmental matters since the late 1960s in the context of the highly public wager between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon that has become the stuff of legend in environmental circles.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Climate Engineering Law

At the time of the publication of this volume, all eyes are turned towards Paris and the unfccc’s cop 21 in anticipation of a new agreement to address climate change. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that this agreement will not constitute a magic bullet. Global average temperatures are projected to increase by 2.6°C by 2100 and reach 3.5°C above pre-industrial levels after 2100, even if the most optimistic outcomes from the conference are realized. The seriousness of temperature increases of this magnitude lies behind the impetus for increasing discussion of a suite of technological options designed to exert dramatic effects on the globe’s environment. These options are known collectively as climate engineering. Largely out of desperation and despair, climate engineering has moved from the realm of taboo to one more policy prescription. Yet, as all of the articles in this issue emphasize, it is a policy prescription not to be embraced lightly given the profound implications that it could pose for human institutions and natural ecosystems. Climate engineering technologies are generally divided into two categories: solar radiation management (srm) approaches, which focus on ‘reducing the amount of solar radiation absorbed by Earth by an amount sufficient to offset the increased trapping of infrared radiation by rising levels of greenhouse gases’, and carbon dioxide removal (cdr) approaches, which ‘seek to reduce co2 levels in the atmosphere, facilitating the escape of more outgoing longwave solar radiation, thus exerting a cooling effect’.1 Much of the early focus of climate engineering research was on technological feasibility and modelling of potential impacts. However, in more recent years, there has been increasing attention to governance issues and the role of

Understanding and Governing the Global Food System

“When it comes to food,” suggests Robert Paarlberg in the preface to his book Food Politics, “everybody is interested” (p. xv). This interest makes sense as a brute function of biology. At the same time food is a basic feature of cultural, economic, and political life. Yet despite food’s obvious importance, it has for long stretches been an object of only marginal interest to the social sciences. Food is mundane and of the body—hardly the stuff to excite disciplines concerned principally with things exotic and of the mind. In the last few years, however, as the four excellent and distinctive books examined here attest, food studies, and the politics of food in particular, have become increasingly fashionable areas for scholarly investigation. This development is welcome, even though many of the factors driving this growing interest, from soaring rates of chronic hunger to environmental harm associated with dominant modes of agricultural production, are not themselves any cause for celebration. Each of the books discussed in this essay sheds important light on crucial food-related concerns, and, more importantly, has things to say about what might be done to address them. They do so through engagement with quite different subject matters. There are nevertheless some major themes that connect these books. The arst has to do with governance, in its broadest sense. In a range