Legal Aspects of Climate Change

by Robin Craig, FCI Steering Committee Member

Climate change poses a number of challenges for researchers in all fields, including those of us in law.

There is, of course, the major challenges of trying to create, legally, approaches to climate change mitigation at both the national and international scales.

Should we pursue a cap-and-trade program, a carbon tax, some combination of the two, or some other approach entirely?

The mechanisms we create to implement any of these approaches will have to have a basis in new laws, with supporting governance mechanisms. However, climate change's challenges for law and governance go far beyond the cap-and-trade/carbon tax debate.

For example, many of the laws governing the allocation and use of natural resources (water, timber, oil, gas) are grounded in assumptions that the future world will continue to behave like the past world did, while pollution and species laws pursue restoration goals that may not be possible in a climate change world.

On the business front, courts are already deciding whether and how insurance policies apply to climate events and risks. Policymakers at all levels are also increasingly acknowledging that land use planning, water allocation, and national energy strategies need to both acknowledge climate change and be harmonized with each other to adjust to climate change impacts.

The Florida Climate Institute offers a forum where experts in all disciplines can work with each other to try to address these new challenges in ways that make sense from all perspectives, and that's one reason why I enjoy participating in the project.