Interview Transcript

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we're joined by Eduardo Viola, Political Scientist and Professor of International Relations at the University of Brasilia. Thank you so much for joining us today!

Eduardo Viola

It's a pleasure to be with you.

Kimberly White

So you're a Professor at the University of Brasilia and a Senior Researcher of the Brazilian Council for Research. You're also the Chair of the Brazilian Research Network on the International System in the Anthropocene and Climate Change. Can you tell us more about these experiences and the focus of your current research?

Eduardo Viola

Okay, well, I’ve had a very long career as a Professor of International Relations. My focus of research, not always, but at least in the last 35 years, has been on environmental issues, both in Brazil and internationally, and the Brazilian foreign environmental policy. So I am in international relations with a focus on environment and climate change and energy transition. My research has been, over the years, focused in Brazil and South America but also following and studying directly the trajectory of emissions, climate policies of major players- United States, European Union, Japan, Russia, China, India, and Brazil. And right now, I am a lot involved with specific research about the South American governance of climate and biodiversity in the Pan-Amazonia, not just the Brazilian Amazonia but the whole Amazon, and comparing politics of different countries, particularly Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador.

Kimberly White

That's really interesting! So, the Amazon Basin is experiencing threats on multiple fronts. One threat is deforestation. As we have seen in recent years, deforestation for mining, or conversion to agriculture and pasture for beef, has resulted in a staggering amount of biodiversity loss, and the massive fires seen over the last few years have dominated global headlines. At the same time, the melting of the arctic ice sheet and the massive glacial melting in Greenland from global warming is changing the circulation of the Atlantic, reducing the rainfall coming into the Amazon from the ocean. These threats highlight a need for both domestic and international policy solutions. Currently, it appears that economic development outweighs environmental protection at the federal level. Given your expertise, how can Brazil best reconcile its need for economic development with its growing environmental concerns?

Eduardo Viola

So, first of all, we could say that since 2013-14, economic growth has prevailed over environmental protection in the Amazon. But right now, it is extreme because it's actually promotion of deforestation, open and consistent promotion of deforestation. Deforestation right now in the Brazilian Amazon has several players. So we have got landowners, backwater landowners, very small capitalization, let's say, that promote illegal deforestation. We have people that are not landowners, but they occupy the lands and open the forest in order to become owners of the forest; we call these "grileiros" in Portuguese in Brazil. We have illegal gold mining, there is a lot of illegal gold mining in the Amazon, but this is not just in the Brazilian Amazon; it is also in the other upstream countries of the Amazon. Right now, we can say that mercury pollution in the middle and lower Amazon Basin is mostly used in upstream countries, but still, let's say the Brazilian gold miners are constrained a little in relation to using mercury more rationally.

We have other minerals also that are illegally mined in the Amazon Basin. The fifth player that is important in this process of deforestation is the invaders of Indigenous territories. As you probably know, in the case of Brazil, almost 17 percent of the area belongs constitutionally to the Indigenous population. But there are a lot of invasions, sometimes with some cooptations of parts of their Indigenous tribes.  And it is very interesting because Brazil has much more strict environmental protection legislation. For example, there is a significant part of logging that is produced illegally in the Brazilian Amazon, but it is moving to the border to Peru, in which the environmental legislation is much weaker. 

So those are the major drivers of deforestation in the Amazon. But you need to consider, generally speaking, that the Brazillian Amazon is populated by around 25 million people, most of them living in the cities but in precarious conditions, generally speaking. So there is a major problem of lack of opportunities, which promotes or creates incentives for poor people living in urban areas to go to the forest to deforest illegally, many times working for bigger players that are driving the deforestation. But in all the cases, those are all players that are small compared to the large players in Brazil. Big companies have been very relevant in deforestation in the Amazon until around one decade ago, particularly during the period of dramatic control and reduction of deforestation, 2005 to 2012. During this period, the major companies were banned on the policy of illegally deforesting the Amazon, and they moved because of the questions of prestige or branding and all these kinds of things. And because they have the possibility of deforesting legally in the Cerrado savanna, that is to the south of the Amazon, in which the rate of deforestation in the last 20 years has been much higher than in the rainforest.

Kimberly White

Illegal logging has been a problem for all of the Amazonian countries, right? I think it was in 1998 that Brazil had commissioned a report that found that 80 percent of logging in the Amazon was done illegally.

Eduardo Viola

Yes, yes. Now it is less than that but still significant, but the data are very precarious. They are all estimations. We know how a lot of loggers moved from illegally to legally, particularly at the time during the most consistent anti-deforestation policy. But there are still a lot, and now it's growing. In the last year, the amount of illegal logging compared with the legal has grown.

Kimberly White

We had similar problems here in the United States with the last administration as far as environmental policy goes. Policies were revoked or basically dismantled. Recently, I read that, under Brazil's current administration, the selective logging that was legal has more than doubled since 2019.

Eduardo Viola

Yes, or more than that. Now, we have logging entering new areas. For example, historically, the logging was more in the state of Pará and also in the state of Rondônia. In the last years, there was a movement, expanding the frontier of deforestation and illegal logging to the southeast of the state of Amazon, Amazonia.

Amazonia is very large. It is as large as Alaska; it is 1.2 million square kilometres.

Kimberly White

That's interesting- I had no idea that it was roughly the size of Alaska! So a few minutes ago, you mentioned something regarding Indigenous communities. You mentioned that they were constitutionally protected. Could you elaborate on that and what that means versus something like land demarcation?

Eduardo Viola

Because t...

Interview Transcript

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White  

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we're joined by Maja Groff, an international lawyer based in The Hague and Convenor of the Climate Governance Commission! Thank you so much for joining us today!

Maja Groff

Pleasure to be here with you, Kimberly.

Kimberly White

So you previously worked with the Permanent Bureau of The Hague Conference on Private International Law. Can you tell us more about this experience?

Maja Groff

Yes, absolutely. It was really a great pleasure to serve as an international civil servant at The Hague Conference on Private International Law, serving the international community, the member states of the organization, which now number over 80 states. And I worked there for over a decade, working on a whole range of existing, binding multilateral treaties across very diverse areas of law, as well as on the development of new international treaties and legal norms. And really, as we see globalization intensifying across a whole range of areas, the demands on international law really are accelerating. So just as an example, of some of the areas I worked on at The Hague Conference, I worked on very widely ratified vital children's conventions, a convention on the protection of adults with disabilities in cross border circumstances, I worked on a pioneering international Hague network of judges, as well as new potential treaties in areas such as the cross border protection of tourists, the recognition and enforcement of foreign civil protection orders in cases of domestic violence, and facilitation of access to foreign law. So it was a really wonderful experience across so many different diverse areas of international law, international human rights law, which exposed me to diverse legal systems around the world, diplomatic processes, and really gave me a sense of the great potential that modern international law can have, in terms of really addressing global issues, very concrete access to justice issues for individuals, for other actors. So it was a really wonderful background for the current work I'm doing at the moment. 

And just another note that The Hague Conference on Private International Law happens to be one of the oldest intergovernmental organizations in the world, dating from 1893. So it's been also a really brilliant vantage point to see sort of the origins of international law dating from the late 1800s to the first Hague peace conferences in 1899 and 1907, which set the stage for some of the international peace and security law we currently have, and for the League of Nations, and the United Nations. So it's been just a wonderful, brilliant vantage point, as well as being around modern international criminal law institutions, the Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon; I've worked at both of them. And to see how international law can progress and make quite dramatic leaps forward with sets of dedicated professionals, dedicated international civil society networks, it's very promising for us and the international community.

Kimberly White

That is quite impressive! And it sounds like you had such wonderful experiences with the different aspects of that. And now you're working with the Global Challenges Foundation. So, the Global Challenges Foundation has identified three global risks to humanity. Can you please tell us what these risks are?

Maja Groff

Yeah, I think the Global Challenges Foundation has been good at raising awareness, public awareness, policymaker awareness about the range of global threats, global risks that confront us. And at the moment, there seems to be, from the Global Challenges Foundation, really a focus on climate change, large-scale environmental degradation, and weapons of mass destruction, which are key and thought to be interconnected challenges. So, of course, climate and large-scale environmental destruction is a newer threat versus the arms threat. And as we all know, they are an accelerating threat, these ecological and climate threats, and also dependent on understanding and policymaking based on very complex and evolving science, so quite a challenging area for international policymakers. 

The weapons of mass destruction issue, of course, with the nuclear age after World War II, has come into focus for the international community, and is less well known, I think, by the general public at the moment, because of some very quite effective arms treaties, bilateral in particular between the US and the former USSR, after the Cold War to regulate bilaterally some of those very dangerous arms races. But now, commentators and experts are also saying that we are living in a high-risk world in the case of weapons of mass destruction, across a whole range of areas, not just nuclear weapons, there's also the threat of new lethal autonomous weapons, the use of AI, we know all about cybersecurity threats. We also know of bio weapons related to different technologies in the development and engineering of viruses, for example. Chemical weapons are still very important and remain a threat. And so on. So I think it's excellent that the Global Challenges Foundation is trying to raise awareness of these interconnected threats, relating to other global threats and try to think carefully and think together, also in an innovative way about how we improve our collective decision making to tackle these threats and indeed, part of the vision of the founder Laszlo Szombatfalvy is to find new international decision making and global governance mechanisms that will, in a consistent, reliable way, manage these risks that we confront.

Kimberly White

Additionally, the Global Challenges Foundation highlighted the three underlying forces of these risks. Can you share more about these?

Maja Groff

So yes, the Global Challenges Foundation has highlighted these three contributing forces- extreme poverty, population growth, and political violence. So I think these are quite interesting, sort of contributing factors that are very socially based throughout our societies. So, for example, we see different polarized movements, unfortunately, across a range of countries and sort of internationalized polarized movements that add to our global risk. Population growth is also highly relevant to our ecological crises and threats and how we accelerate our responses to the ecological threats so that we don't all become over-consumers, as has happened in the developed world without transitioning to economies where we can have really deep circularity, so we really reuse and recycle and make sure that we're not just depleting global natural resources. 

Kimberly White

So international environmental law seems unable to deal with the shared global problems we are facing today. It is state-centered and doesn't necessarily cater to our shared responsibilities toward the global environment, even though the well-being of states depends on the well-being of our global environment. Why is current environmental law unable to achieve the deep structural reforms necessary to address shared global issues such as climate change? 

Maja Groff

Yes, it's a very good question, Kimberly. I think it's one that we have to keep asking ourselves. As an international lawyer, I think it's vital to keep interrogating and asking how ...

Interview Transcript

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by Frank Biermann, Professor of Global Sustainability Governance at Utrecht University, Director of the ERC GlobalGoals Project, Founder of the Earth System Governance Project, and Editor of the Earth System Governance journal. Thank you for joining us today, Frank!

Frank Biermann

Thank you so much, Kimberly. It's a pleasure being with you.

Kimberly White

You're a professor of global sustainability governance at Utrecht University and founder of the Earth System Governance Project. Can you tell us more about these experiences and the focus of your current research?

Frank Biermann

Oh, thank you so much. But there are two different functions. Let me just explain both of them. The one is, of course, my normal professional function. I'm a professor of global sustainability governance at Utrecht University. That means essentially, I am a political scientist, I also have some background in international law. But essentially, my research, my interest in teaching also is political science, international relations. So I'm driven by trying to better understand how we can create institutions that can deal better with problems of global environmental change. We know that the earth system, the entire Earth system is today, transformed by human actions, climate change is accelerating, and we have to struggle very hard to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees. 

Species extinction, the worldwide spread of plastics in the oceans, ozone depletion, all these kinds of problems are essentially global problems. That means countries have to work together, governments need to agree on joint goals, they have to get together to share resources to share knowledge, governments have to adjust the policies, and we all have to change to adjust to these kinds of challenges. And for that, we need international institutions. We need international governance. And so far, these institutions are not effective; they're not really able to cope with these challenges. So, therefore, we need better institutions. We need better global governance. And this is what keeps me busy for the last 30 years, this is my field of research, this is the field of my teaching, and this is also where I'm personally extremely passionate about. I should also add that it's not necessarily just a picture of a win-win. It's not that we just need to have a better institutional design, and then everything will be resolved, and everything will be better. Instead, I'm very much concerned about conflicts of power and global inequalities and all kinds of conflicts that we have that countries are in a variety of relationships of inequality, dependence, post-colonialism, etc. So this is also part of the story of international institutions that we have to take into account, and we want to understand how we can try together to achieve an equitable and more sustainable future for all within the natural basis and the natural conditions of our planet. So this is my research, this is what I’m working on, and this is the key area of my Chair as a Professor of Global Sustainability Governance at Utrecht University as part of the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht.

And Earth System Governance is a slightly different story. It is not only about research, certainly not about my own research; it is about the network. It's about global networking to jointly study these questions that I have just laid out. And here we are a bit building on models that have been developed in the natural sciences in terms of global research collaborations. And the earlier years, like in the 19th century, social science was very much an individual activity. People were just there, they read a book, and you write a book, and you read a couple of books, and then you continue the progress of scientific knowledge in the social sciences. And this is essentially the model of the 19th century and the 20th century in the social sciences. And I believe that we cannot continue like this any longer. So we have to work much more together. And the natural sciences have done this already since the 1950s. Working together in large communities and large networks, where you exchange data, you exchange scientific insights work according to large science plans for sometimes five or ten years, where hundreds of scientists work together and try to jointly really better understand the reality of what's going on. And this is a model that natural scientists have done for quite some time. I believe it's also very much important for the social sciences. And this is essentially what the Earth System Governance Project is about. It's a global network. It's a network where hundreds of scientists are coming together and jointly discuss findings, research methods, questions, and theories about this big challenge of governance and the transformation of the entire earth system.

So we're not talking about air pollution; we talk about the transformation of the entire Earth system. We're not talking about the protection of individual species in our neighborhoods; we talk about the sixth mass extinction of species that are kind of being extinct on a huge scale, we're talking about sea-level rise, we are talking about land degradation, we are talking about ozone depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer. Half of the habitable land on earth we are using for agriculture, and we have totally transformed the planet. And I think this is a situation that requires a new perspective. And this is not the perspective of environmental policy. This is the perspective where we have to discuss these governance problems, the governance challenges, of the entire planetary system. And this is why we have developed this concept of earth system governance, which means institutions that are dealing with social-ecological systems at planetary scale. 

Kimberly White

During your time working in this field, have you seen any shift in environmental governance policy towards a more earth system-based approach?

Frank Biermann

Not on a systemic level. I think some of the key issues are not sufficiently addressed in the political space. Climate change certainly is. I mean, climate change certainly is a big issue also because of the youth movement that is associated with it, and I think it's a key issue in many countries. Not in all countries, but like in the Netherlands, where I'm based, it's certainly one of the key issues in political discourse. So there, I certainly see a change. I mean, when I started my career, it was a marginal issue; it was a fringe issue. And we went to international conferences on international relations; for example, the environmental committee was extremely small. And now the International Studies Association is one of the big institutions in science, in the study of international relations, Now, the environmental studies section there is one of the largest. This change is certainly there. I missed the change on a variety of other issues like food, for example. I am missing a strong focus on some of these big, big issues that we have to discuss, like the provision of food in times of climate change, and also many of the responses to climate change, where I believe that the provision of food is one of the big challenges in the future. And here, I'm missing strong political attention to these kinds of issues. And this is one of the issues that I'm working on to bring this forward. But generally, there is an ...

Interview Transcript
Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White
Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by Princess Esméralda of Belgium, journalist, documentary‐maker, environmental activist, and President of the King Leopold III Fund for Nature Exploration and Conservation. Thank you so much for joining us today!

Princess Esméralda
Thank you for inviting me.

Kimberly White
So you’re the President of the King Leopold III Fund for Nature Exploration, and Conservation. Can you tell us more about the King Leopold Fund and what it aims to accomplish?

Princess Esméralda
Yeah, sure, it was created by my father in 1972. And I have to tell you that my father was a pioneer in the field of the environment because as a young, very young man in the 1930s, he was already very concerned about the state of nature and the way human beings were having an impact on biodiversity. And he made a speech in 1934, in London, saying that his generation had absolutely no excuse not to see all the damage that we were already doing on the natural world. So that’s pretty early in the time. And then, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, he traveled extensively, especially in Latin America, in the Amazon. He spent several months with Indigenous communities there. And he decided to create this fund, not only to scientifically explore nature but also to protect it, and to protect the Indigenous communities that he had seen were the best custodians of our biodiversity. So he created this fund, and after his death in 1983, I became President, and we are very active. Actually, we finance probably between 10 and 20 missions a year all over the world, both in the field of exploration and in the field of conservation.

Kimberly White
That’s very impressive. So can you tell us about some of the most recent missions you’re funding?

Princess Esméralda
Yeah, sure. So we have done a lot of missions in Africa lately, related to the big apes. So you might know that there is a very important park in Africa called Virunga, which is a jewel of biodiversity and has also the famous gorillas, which at one point were on the brink of extinction. And luckily, now really, their population has grown again. And it’s really a big success, although it’s a part of Africa, which is extremely volatile because there’s a lot of violence and armed conflict. And so there are many problems. But we work also closely with the park, and we have done some missions there to scientifically study those species, and that’s only one example. But then we have also a lot of missions in South America, also sometimes in North America. Whether it is to study some new species of insects, so it’s very diverse, we have really a lot of different missions.

Kimberly White
That’s amazing. And I love the work that you’re doing in Virunga, it’s great because with mountain gorillas and with all gorillas, really, they are critically endangered. And right now, the conservation efforts have been extremely helpful. And currently, I think they’re the only great ape in the world with an increasing population.

Princess Esméralda
Yes, it’s fantastic.

Kimberly White
So, you and your daughter climbed Kilimanjaro in 2019 to raise funds for an NGO in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Hero Women Rising. Can you tell us more about this experience and what led you to do this?

Princess Esméralda
Ah, it was my meeting with an extraordinary woman, and this woman is named Neema Namadamu, she’s from the DRC. She’s from Kivu, which is a province of the South, which is extremely dangerous for locals, but especially for women. The violence against women is terrible. And I met Neema, and she told me about her life. And let me just tell you in a few minutes about her life. She got polio when she was very young. I think she was two. And immediately, her father said, “If I have a daughter who has polio, she will never be able to marry,”- which is something very important in the community there. And so he left his wife. And Neema’s mother said, “I want to give a chance to my daughter to go to school.” And because they lived in a village, and there was no way they could find a way to get to school, which was quite far, far away. She decided, yes, she would take her daughter to school, and she took her on her back every day. I think it was about five or six kilometers every day to go to the school. Until Neema became an adolescent, it was difficult at that time for her mother to carry her. So she sent her in the valley down where she could easily go to school. And Neema said, “For the love of my mother, I have to continue to go to school.”

She probably was the first of her community to go all the way to university, to graduate from university. All the time, because she said I have to do something for my mother who really sacrificed so much for me. And then Neema said, “I want to do the same for the girls of my community.” And a few years later, she decided to create a program for the girls to keep girls in school. Because what happens also in many regions of the world, and there particularly, is that when the girls have their first menstruation, they miss school for a few days because they don’t have all the necessary tools. And then the parents say, “Oh, their results are not so good, we should stop. Why do we pay for school if the girls have such bad marks?” So Neema decided to go to school to teach the girls to show them what you can do if you have an education. And she has been extremely successful with her program to keep girls at school. And I said, “Okay, she inspired me so much, because she, with so many handicaps, not only physical but also due to the violence and the situation in her country. And she managed to achieve so many things.” So I said, “Okay, I will do something which is not comparable, but it’s also an effort. I will climb Kilimanjaro with my daughter to raise funds for her organization.” And that’s what we did. It was a wonderful experience, first of all, because I was with my daughter, and because it’s a very beautiful place. So yes, it’s something very special for me, this memory.

Kimberly White
Her story is inspiring. I know with advancing gender equality and empowering women, we can deliver those cross-sectoral long-term solutions to climate change. In fact, in 2019, Project Drawdown had listed in their solutions to climate change that educating girls is the sixth most important solution to mitigate the climate crisis. So the work she’s doing in the DRC is amazing.

Princess Esméralda
Yeah, absolutely. Because you educate girls as we just said, first of all, they continue being educated. So they don’t marry too early, they don’t have children too early, they learn about the environment, they become really interested, they have solutions on the ground, there are so many advantages to that.

Kimberly White
Absolutely, and women are on the frontlines of the climate crisis. I think the latest statistic was 80 percent of those people who have been displaced by the major weather events caused by climate change are women and girls. So it’s imperative that we not only focus our solutions on them, but we need to include them in the decision-making process as well.

Princess Esméralda
Absolutely, because as you say, they are very much impacted. Because first of all, they are among the poorest in society in the developing countries. And also because they are the ones...

Interview Transcript

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by Louis Kotzé, Research Professor at North-West University and Senior Professorial Fellow in Earth System Law at the University of Lincoln. Thank you for joining us today!

Louis Kotzé

Thank you for the invitation, Kimberly. I'm very excited to speak to you.

Kimberly White

So you're a Research Professor of Law at North-West University in South Africa, and you are a Senior Professional Fellow in Earth System Law at the University of Lincoln.  Can you tell us what earth system law is?

Louis Kotzé

Oh, yes. So earth system law is a new legal paradigm that we've been working on for the last couple of years. And in developing this new legal paradigm, we realized, and we put great emphasis on the fact that as a human social system, law is an essential element of governance. And it certainly serves a very useful purpose as a vehicle for shaping behavior to achieve certain desired ends. That is the classical role of law after all, and law also plays a critically important role in environmental governance or the more broadly conceived idea of earth system governance, certainly, insofar as it seeks to shape or regulate or constrain, or more broadly would govern, how humans interact with other earth system constituents, aspects, and earth system processes. But we think that because law is caught up within, how can one put it, the stifling confines of its outdated Holocene orientated assumptions and orientation. It's not necessarily seen to be compatible anymore with and responsive to an earth system approach to governance which means that it cannot meaningfully address the full scope of all the legal aspects of earth system governance. So basically, in a nutshell, environmental law, which is the legal discipline most obviously concerned with environmental impacts, does not take a systems approach. And we need to consider this, I think, in the context of the Anthropocene trope, which is also a main part of my body of work. And the legal implications of the Anthropocene trope are becoming increasingly clear, no less, because of this new geological terminology because that's what it is; it's a geological term. It casts no judgment on the desirability or otherwise of this new state of affairs. But it does invite profound normative questions, as Tim Stephens, our friend from the University of Sydney, says. And I think that these questions will ask of us to consider how and by us I specifically mean lawyers, but also other scientists and people interested in governance. These questions will ask us to consider how, and the extent to which, the Anthropocene as epistemology or trope is changing our perceptions of law as a regulatory institution, including our perception of law's content, its purpose, its objectives, and certainly also its design. These questions will require us to reflect on human agency and the role of law in governing human actions in the Anthropocene, including certainly the impacts of these actions on the earth system and on the many other earth system processes and aspects and the links that these also have continued human existence on earth. So, to me, at least, the Anthropocene in this sense, allows for a sort of opening up, as it were of prohibitive epistemic closures in the law and of the legal discourse more generally, and perhaps even more importantly, of the world order that the law operatively seeks to maintain, to a range of other understandings of cognitive frameworks for global environmental change. So the Anthropocene reveals the contexts to contemplate possible ways to mediate this change through the law. And as a result, I think there is pretty much general agreement that the Anthropocene will ask of us to critically revisit the many traditional or trite assumptions that we have internalized over so many years, certainly since 1972 since the Stockholm conference. 

The idea of earth system law is that the development of such a new legal paradigm will require considerable creative, certainly, out-of-the-box thinking alongside the imagery of this earth system metaphor. And this will not be a straightforward or easy task, we think. And lawyers cannot go this alone. So we would need to embrace and rely on the expertise and the insights and the creative thinking of a whole range of other disciplines. I'm thinking of earth system scientists, geologists, geographers, ethicists, to name but a few. And I think we should be motivated by the idea that little is more difficult than learning to think differently. And we would need, certainly as lawyers speaking for myself as an environmental lawyer, to try and think differently. Now, are we willing, and will we ultimately be able to upset and criticize and rethink and reconfigure our traditions, our beliefs and attitudes, when it comes to thinking about a different type of law or legal paradigm that we want to have, and that's a better fit for the purpose of the Anthropocene? Personally, I believe that we are, and I want to invite people to join us in exploring the new legal paradigm of earth system law. And I see certainly a lot of potential for people involved in the Common Home of Humanity initiative, also to participate in this grander project, Kimberly, thanks.

Kimberly White

Thank you. I think that's great. We actually had professor Will Steffen on one of our first episodes, and he's one of the top earth system scientists. And we were able to learn about more of the science. So it's really great to learn more about the law side of the earth system. 

Louis Kotzé

Absolutely. We certainly rely a lot on the work of Will Steffen. And also, certainly, his work on planetary boundaries with Johan Rockström. And in the next few weeks, a new research handbook on law, governance, and planetary boundaries will appear with Edward Elgar that was co-edited by myself and Duncan French, with contributions actually also from Johan Rockström, from Will Steffen, and several other people that are working in this area.

Kimberly White

Fantastic, looking forward to checking that out. And to go further into earth system law, you're actually one of the founders of the Earth System Law Task Force. Can you tell us more about this?

Louis Kotzé

Yes. So the task force is an extremely exciting endeavor, an opportunity to become involved with the work on earth system law. So it is part of the Earth System Governance Network that was founded by Professor Frank Biermann from Utrecht. The Earth System Governance Network is currently, it's a global research alliance, and it is the largest social science research network in the area of governance and global environmental change. Now, the Earth System Governance Research Alliance takes up the challenge of exploring political solutions, including also legal solutions, of course, because of the link between politics and law and social behavior, and model more effective governance mechanisms to cope with the current transitions in the biochemical systems of the planet or they more broadly see the earth system. So the Earth System Governance Project and its network set up the task force. There are other task forces as well dealing with other issues, and ours was created in 2017. And it focuses specifically on earth system law. The task force established an interdisciplinary community of scientists, mostly lawyers, but there are certainly also non-lawyers among us, tha...