Interview Transcript

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we're joined by Maria Antonia Tigre, Director of Latin America for the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment. Thank you for joining us today! 

Maria Antonia Tigre

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Kimberly White

So Maria, can you tell us about the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment and the work you do there? 

Maria Antonia Tigre

Absolutely. So the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment, the GNHRE, is basically what it sounds like. It's a global network of academics, researchers, policymakers, lawyers and community activists that are particularly interested in this intersection of human rights in the environment. It started in 2018 as the brainchild of Anna Grear, who's an academic with the simple idea to bring people together who are working at this intersection. And the network recognizes the intersection of these two domains that human rights impact the environment and environmental quality impacts human rights. And so it nurtures a group of people who wanted to find more effective solutions than what had been done up until now. And because our core team has dedicated members divided by geographic regions, our growing network is particularly diverse. I'm the Director for Latin America and have as a result, the responsibility to engage with members who are based or focus their work on that particular region. This is done through webinars, through blog posts and an exchange of academic scholarship. We have a dedicated virtual research repository that contains over 2000 sources for research, which is by far the most extensive dedicated research portal on human rights and the environment available. And we are constantly updating it so it reflects the most recent scholarship on the team and particularly through research from those different regions of the world that are not always as focused in academia. So we also have a blog that provides commentaries on recent legal innovations, such as court decisions that have recognized the right to a healthy environment in some particular way. And since 2020 was the year of zoom meetings and webinars, we have developed a series of webinars focused on human rights-based climate litigation, which was our biggest programming initiative so far. We had an introductory webinar that provided a broad overview of human rights-based climate litigation, and then subsequent webinars that each focused on a specific region. The webinars had a very interesting mix of advocates, scholars, and lawyers, some of which were actually litigating the claims that we were talking about, which was a really interesting perspective to look from. And we had the privilege to hear from, in our webinar on focus on Latin America, we heard from Soledad García Muñoz who is the first Special Rapporteur on Economic, Social, Cultural and Environmental Rights at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. And we got from her the broad perspective on how to recognize climate change and develop climate litigation at the inter-American system. This broad network that we have has allowed us to get a worldwide conversation on climate litigation, it goes well beyond the discussions that we have seen so far, with the truly incredible quality of interventions of very thoughtful people trying to figure out how to protect human rights and environmental rights. We have several projects planned for 2021 that focus on advancing the development of this right and forge new conversations and relationships among our members.

Kimberly White

That's fantastic. I'm looking forward to checking all of that out, especially the research repository. I think that sounds very interesting. So 2020 was a challenging year, with the pandemic and lock-downs and everything that went along with that. What are some of the highlights for human rights and the environment that stood out to you recently that we should know about? 

Maria Antonia Tigre

I think so. I think there have been several cases in Latin America that have advanced climate litigation through a human rights-based approach and also focused on the pandemic, specifically. I think what's interesting about the COVID-19 pandemic is that it has truly sort of spread throughout all crevices of society. And, of course, it's primarily a health crisis with devastating consequences on the human right to life and the human right to health but the urgent and all encompassing nature of the pandemic’s effect has complicated other environmental and human rights challenges in unpredictable and unprecedented ways. And given the origin of the Coronavirus as a zoonotic disease, meaning that it was transmitted from animals to humans, the exploitation of wild species and deforestation becomes a central aspect in addressing the pandemic and preventing future ones. So I think the right to a healthy environment has really developed sort of, within that whole context is sort of a response to the pandemic as well. And in fact, I'm actually coordinating a working group at the Global Pandemic Network, which developed sort of as of response from a series of academics all over the world to the pandemic, with this idea of responding to what we're living and trying to understand it from a legal perspective and trying to find better responses to react to it and as we sort of move towards this next phase, but also preventing future ones. And this group that I'm coordinating focuses on how the right to a healthy environment and other sort of green rights have been infringed by the pandemic. And one of the aspects that we look at is precisely this increased and modified interface between people and wildlife, which leads to the spillover of diseases from wildlife to people. And from a legal perspective, we are asking how the right to a healthy environment as well as these other related rights, such as the right to water, the right to food, the rights of indigenous peoples, play a part in that discussion. So I think there's an increased call for this international recognition of the right to a healthy environment because of the pandemic.

Kimberly White

Yeah, unfortunately, it has been challenging, and you know, again, it is all interconnected. That brings me to my next question, and we can dive in a little bit further with COVID. So the climate crisis and the concurrent COVID-19 pandemic seemed to show us a connection between environmental degradation, health, and human rights. How would the Global Pact for the Environment bolster human rights while bringing about international accountability?

Maria Antonia Tigre

So I think a lot of the studies that we've seen from the pandemic and the underlying causes of it, they show that these causes are the same global environmental changes that drive biodiversity loss and climate change, including issues like land use change, agricultural expansion in wildlife trade and consumption. So the role of a deteriorating environment both as a cause and a consequence of the pandemic is very significant here because it raises, like I said, the demand for international recognition of a right to a healthy environment, and this recognition is crucial given the link between the rights of health and environmental protection, which was evidenced by the pandemic and the recognition at the international level would provide for increased accountability and ensure that environ...

Interview Transcript

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we're joined by Katherine Richardson, Professor in Biological Oceanography and leader of the Sustainability Science Center at the University of Copenhagen, and one of the world's leading experts on climate change. Thank you so much for joining us today, Katherine.

Katherine Richardson

Well, thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Kimberly White

So you teach biological oceanography, and you're the leader of the Sustainability Science Center at the University of Copenhagen. You were also Chair of the Danish Commission on Climate Change Policy. Can you tell us more about these experiences and the focus of your current research?

Katherine Richardson

Yeah, well, first of all, you introduced me as being a biological oceanographer. And it's absolutely true. I got my PhD in biological oceanography, and universities are such that you then get professorships in whatever you have your PhD in. But although I still do research in biological oceanography, I really am much more, much more taken up with this idea of Earth System Science and have been contributing for the last 30 years or so to trying to understand the role of the ocean and the biological processes I look at in the ocean in a larger context than just the ocean. So I would say I'm more of an earth system expert on how do physics, biology, especially biology, chemistry, and people interact to make the conditions here on earth. So my experiences are very, I mean, I'm getting old, so I've had a lot of good experiences, and fortunately not very many bad experiences. The really rewarding experiences have been talking to people, either with different scientific backgrounds, or even with different kinds of policy backgrounds, and finding a common understanding and seeing where the interactions are between our fields, and our interests and how we can learn from looking at those interactions. So the focus of my current research is really understanding what causes differences in marine plankton ecosystems and how these differences may actually influence climate development on the planet as a whole. And I have a really, really exciting new project, which is what I really think is my first really truly Earth System Science project, in which we're taking sediment cores in the ocean sediments near Iceland and bringing them up and analyzing them for ancient DNA. So we can describe not just what fossilized organisms we find in the course, which people have been doing for years. But with the help of ancient DNA, we can describe whole ecosystems and what they looked like. We're then also doing it on land in lakes so we can describe the climate changes that happened that we can also see in our sediment cores. How the climate changes that happened were transported to land via the ocean? How did the nature change there, because of the climate change, and also because people were there? And then we have some social scientists involved as well, who are looking at how people responded to these changes in the nature around them, so the indirect effects of climate change on human populations. So I'm using a lot of time and energy and not to speak of money on this project, which I find very, very exciting.

Kimberly White

That is fascinating. I'm looking forward to learning more about that and following along with your research as it goes on. So human development has grown exponentially since the mid 20th century, and so much so that the state of the planet that can support contemporary human societies is now being destabilized. You are one of the renowned scientists that developed the planetary boundaries framework. Can you tell us more about this framework and how it can benefit sustainable development?

Katherine Richardson

Oh, yes, absolutely. We all know that in the Brundtland report in 1987, this was a great step forward because people began to think of sustainability as not only being economic sustainability but that there needed to be an environmental and a social component as well. Unfortunately, in 1987, they couldn't really define what the environmental component was all about. We can do that today. And interestingly enough, I think we pretty much had the seeds to do that even in ‘87 because, in 1972, we got a picture of the Earth from space. We've all seen that picture. I've been told it's the most downloaded picture from the net, and it shows the earth alone out in space, and it shows clearly that there's no umbilical cord. And what that means is that the earth's resources must be limited. And we use those resources; those resources are what makes us rich. And the fact that there's no umbilical cord tells us that, once we've used the resources that are here, we're simply not going to get any more. So when politicians say that we're not going to let human-caused global warming be more than two degrees in comparison to the pre-industrial time, then they have set a limit, they've said, okay, we this is the size of the garbage dump that we can use in the atmosphere. And you can take two degrees, and you can translate it to the size of how much can we put out. We know exactly who's used the first half of the garbage dump, and the whole political exercise is about who should get the rights to use the last half of that resource. But we all know, this isn't only about climate. It's also about biodiversity. It's also about an ozone hole. It's also about water use. It's also about the felling of forests and the use of land. It's about pollution, contaminants, it's about particles in the atmosphere. So what we try and do with planetary boundaries is to for all of these important processes in the earth system, like the biosphere, the living component, the climate, the water, and so on, try and examine, with scientific-based evidence, try and examine what would be the limit in terms of if we didn't want to push this biodiversity or water or whatever we did, we didn't want to push it so far globally, that we risk changing the overall conditions on Earth, what's the safe operating space? What's the limit for how far we can actually push these different processes in the earth system. I actually regret we call it planetary boundaries because people tend to equate it then with tipping points or thresholds. That's not what it's all about. It's more like blood pressure. If your blood pressure is over 120 over 80, that's no guarantee you're going to have a heart attack, but it does raise the risk. So we put it down. And that's what we're saying about the way that we're pushing some of these important processes in the earth system. In order to be able to and the importance for planetary boundaries in something like policy development and sustainable development is that it helps us recognize the biophysical constraints within which we have to get, for example, our food production or our energy production to fit. So we talk about transforming the global food system, for example, and planetary boundaries can tell us that we need to transform it in such a way that we produce nutrient-rich food for nine to 10 billion people without using any more land by reducing the amount of water that we put into it by reducing the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus, and so on. So it tells us we need a green revolution on essentially the same land area that we have today. Fortunately, lots of scenarios are making it look like this will be possible if we push all of the buttons that we have available. But my point is that the value of the planetary boundaries framework o...

Interview Transcript

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by Viriato Soromenho-Marques, Professor of Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Nature, and European Ideas at the University of Lisbon. Thank you for joining us today! 

Viriato Soromenho-Marques

Thank you, Kimberly, for having me on this podcast.

Kimberly White

So, you teach political philosophy, philosophy and nature, and European ideas at the University of Lisbon; you were also one of the authors of the Portuguese strategy for sustainable development. Can you tell us more about these experiences?

Viriato Soromenho-Marques

Well, I think that probably the most important thing that I can tell you about my own experience is how I feel so overwhelmed looking back to the 70s, when I started to be deeply engaged with the environmental movement with NGOs, in Portugal, in Europe. I think that when I went back 40 years, almost 50 years, I am overwhelmed to see that we live now in a hotter, different planet. It's an amazing experience, and not in the positive sense, but it's overwhelming, as I said, because if we look to the state of our planet, not just in terms of climate change, but also in terms of biodiversity, and many other features of the environment, we understand that we are in a race, a race against time, a race between the problems that we are creating with our clumsy way of dwelling on this planet, and the severe difficulties that we are facing in order to solve the problems that we are creating. So what I have done until now, as a member of NGOs, as member of advisory bodies like the Portuguese Council on Environmental, the European Council on Environmental that reunites many organizations in different European countries, as a member of the high-level group on energy and climate change, on the way to COP 15. It was a group assembled around the President of the European Commission and also giving advice to some foundations like the Gulbenkian Foundation that recently awarded the Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity to Greta Thunberg. What I'm trying to do with my activities, basically, is to give a contribution, to try to cope with the problems that we are doing as a collective as humanity, because I think that we need public policies. But we need to overcome a very narrow understanding of what is at stake with the environment and climate crisis. If we think that this problem is a problem to be solved, just by governments and states and big corporations, I think we are wrong. Because at the root of this problem, we have the need for a profound shift transformation in our set of values in our vision of the world. And in order to do that, to perform that, I think that we need the contribution also of culture, of ethics, of religion. So we are all actors in this fight for the continuation of the survival of human civilization on earth. One of the insights that very soon, I tried to systematize in my writings was to define what is an environmental crisis? Let me clarify that. When I speak of climate change, I consider climate change, not as something that exists per se, but as a part, as a chapter as a dimension of environmental crisis. So looking at the environmental crisis, I think that we may identify five dimensions or five features, five characteristics that are completely unique. First, environmental crisis, with climate, of course, inside it is the only really planetary crisis there. There is no other thing with such scope. We may see that, for instance, climate change is basically or intensively felt on the extreme north and extreme south of our planet, in regions in which there is almost nobody living. So it's completely planetary; there are no sanctuaries. And secondly, it's an irreversibility and entropic crisis. We know that we have massive biodiversity extinction, and when a species disappears, it is forever. So it's irreversible. There is also a third dimension; it's the cumulative acceleration. We are indeed in a process of great deceleration, inside what is now called the Anthropocene. And what is happening, for instance, with the oceans, the ocean acidification is a good example of this speedy cumulative acceleration we are embarked on. And a fourth characteristic is there is a growing political and social unrest. We know that many conflicts now, inside countries and between countries, have also the mark, have also the sign of environmental crisis, probably the Arab Spring would never have happened without the climate change impact. And finally, something that probably will speak later in our conversation, we are creating a kind of what I call the ontological debt between generations. So we are transmitting to the coming generations to adapt, not in terms of money or capital, but adapt in terms of the harm we are doing, to the planet, to the software of the planet, to the biosphere, to the atmosphere, to the hydrosphere. So we are jeopardizing the planet. And so we are transmitting a kind of ontological debt to be paid by the coming generations.

Kimberly White

Now, that's really interesting and diving back further into some of these challenges of the environmental crisis that we're currently in; in the book Security at a Crossroad-New Tools for New Challenges, you highlight the seven categories of human security. Can you elaborate on these? And in your view, what are some of the challenges climate change poses to human security?

Viriato Soromenho-Marques

Yeah, with pleasure. Well, when we speak normally about security, we think immediately in terms of strategy in terms of military security, military balance. That's our own conception. It's an old one. In the past 200 years ago, 100 years ago, it was logical to think in that way, today it is completely not just out of fashion, but completely wrong. Indeed, we had in 1994, the United Nations Development Programme in a report that was published that year ‘94, advanced with a more comprehensive concept of human security, trying to look to security, also, and basically, from the perspective of the individual, of the person of ourselves. So what do we as citizens of our countries, as citizens of the world, what are, for us, the main dimensions and features of security? And the seven categories that you mentioned are part of that vision of transforming the paradigm of security. They are basically the following. So economic security, that's completely important in a world that has grown to have more jobless people on account of the pandemic situation. Economic Security is also a key dimension, food security, health security, other two very important dimensions and environmental security. Well, I would say that environmental security is heretical because it entails also those that I mentioned, personal security to be as an individual, to feel safe no matter your race, your sexual orientation, your net level of material wealth, community security, to live in a safe community and political security. I think those seven dimensions, as I mentioned in the chapter you mentioned, are, in my opinion, very connected with the big contribution of one probably the most famous of the most important American presidents ever. I mean, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that in the famous speech of the State of the Union, 1941, spoke about the need to have, at a global level, not just at the level of the United States, at global level, four freedoms. Those four freedoms, as probably many of our listeners know by heart, are freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, in the words of Roosevelt, freedom of every person to wor...

Interview Transcript

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by Ana Barreira, lawyer and Director and founding member of the International Institute for Law and the Environment (IIDMA). Thank you for joining us today!

Ana Barreira

Hello, how are you? Thank you.

Kimberly White

So you're the director and founding member of the International Institute for Law and the Environment. Can you tell us more about IIDMA and the work you do there?

Ana Barreira

Yes, of course. IIDMA was founded in 1996, it is already 24 years ago, with the purpose of contributing to sustainable development and environmental protection through the study, analysis, development, implementation, and enforcement of the law. Because the law is fundamental for organizing societies and those years in 1996, there was already a lot of environmental law. And we were focusing those years on environmental law. Since then, we have been working in many different areas, not only in sectors of the environment as water protection, marine protection, biodiversity, or climate change and energy transition but also on horizontal matters as governance. And we have worked a lot on party participation in the implementation of the Aarhus Convention, which is a convention on access to environmental information, public participation, and access to justice in environmental matters. It is known as an environmental democracy convention. But these years, now we have new science, and in 2009, the scientific community developed the framework for planetary boundaries. And if you realize all the work we have been doing, through law; we have been tackling all the planetary boundaries, or most of them because we have this science framework that we need the law to keep our activities and our lives within the planetary boundaries. And law helps a lot. And the work we have been doing in the last, I would say six years, has been concentrating a lot on climate change and energy transition, particularly in energy transition. What we saw is that the energy system, particularly the electricity generation system, was based mainly in Spain and in many European union member states on coal. And coal is one of the most polluting sources of energy from a climate change point of view; it generates a lot of co2. We started to implement this transition in Spain, advocating for the closure of coal power plants, we were using the rule of law tools, we were advocating, we were attending ADMs of energy companies, and we were discussing with energy companies. We were having conversations with authorities. We produced some studies on the impacts on health from the emissions of coal power plants, showing the externalities of the emissions of coal power plants and its cost on health. Like having data on premature deaths produced by this pollution, and all the economic impact that has like, for example, how many hospitalizations were necessary because of those emissions and how many lost working days happened in Spain. And also, we used our litigation. We started to go to court, to show and to challenge some of the permits granted to coal power plants. We saw that those permits were not in line with the legal framework we have at the European Union level. What has happened is that because of the work we have been developing in these last six years, at the end of June, more than half of the capacity of coal installed in Spain has closed and the rest of the capacity installed in Spain, it's going to close very soon. So we are having outcomes, positive outcomes, to reduce CO2 emissions from Spain through our work through using the tools that the rule of law offers to citizens.

Kimberly White

That's really interesting. I'd be keen to see the studies you have there because I know globally, air pollution from burning fossil fuels costs almost $3 trillion every year. And the premature deaths associated with that, the last time I checked, were 4 million premature deaths a year. And kudos to you and the team at IIDMA! That is quite an impressive feat. 

Ana Barreira

In addition, in IIDMA, we are now following the process of all the European Green Deal. But in Spain, as part of this program we have on energy transition and climate change, in Spain, we still don't have a climate change law. There are many European Union countries that have their own climate change law, and even some other countries, for example, in Latin America, they are producing their own climate change laws. But in Spain, during COP21, in Paris, our president committed to start working on a climate change law, that was in 2015, but still, we don't have one. Now, there is a bill being discussed in the Spanish parliament; it is the climate change and energy transition law. And we have been advocating for a stronger law because it has some deficits in its governance; for example, a good climate change act has to be accompanied with a climate change committee, which is a scientific body, following the example of the IPCC. So many climate change laws, they have their own scientific body, which normally it's called climate change committee, for example, in the UK, in France, or in Denmark, including now, the EU where it is being discussed or it is under discussion, the future EU climate law, the European Parliament has added the need in its first reading of the need of having this kind of body. The Spanish law doesn’t contain that, so we have been advocating for that.   

Kimberly White

So nature, the environment, and the earth system are, by definition, systemic and interdependent. The magnitude and immediacy of the looming climate catastrophe show the need to design and implement a global public policy, creating instruments and institutions that enable collective action. How can recognizing the earth system as a common heritage of humankind better articulate our responsibility to protect the integrity of the earth's ecological systems? 

Ana Barreira

I think this is fundamental. Because as it has been said, in other of these podcasts series, the earth system is not legally recognized yet. And we need first, that recognition. And the best way is to be recognized as a common heritage of humankind, an intangible common heritage of humankind, and how this can articulate our responsibility to protect the integrity of the earth's ecological system. If we have that recognition, that will help to integrate the planetary boundaries system within the international legal system. We have a very well developed international legal framework for the protection of the environment, but it's framed in a very siloed manner; there is no interconnectivity. And as you are asking, we need to protect the integrity of the earth's ecological systems, and we are not doing that through the law. Because we have a lag, we don't have this definition at the International Law level of the earth system. So if it is considered as a common heritage of humankind, this is going to allow the international community to start joining the dots of all the legal frameworks we have, because we have a Convention on Biological Diversity, that until now, there has been not much cooperation with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. We have another convention, they are called the Rio conventions on the certification, so they have been working in a silo manner. So we need to do an integration of all the, and I'm just citing some of the multilateral environmental agreements we...

Interview Transcript

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by Klaus Bosselmann, Director of the New Zealand Centre for Environmental Law at the University of Auckland. Thank you for joining us today!

Klaus Bosselmann  

Thank you.

Kimberly White

So you've been the Director of the New Zealand Centre for Environmental Law since it began in 1999. Could you tell us more about NZCEL and your work there? 

Klaus Bosselmann

Yes, the New Zealand Center for Environmental Law has its working model, working for sustainability. It's an interdisciplinary Institute involving scientists, political scientists, sociologists, lawyers, all united in the pursuit of making sustainability a reality in the legal system. And what that means, of course, first of all, sustainability needs to be clearly defined. And that has shaped my work in the 1990s, as somebody who has joined the Rio Earth Summit where sustainable development was first negotiated. And in essence, what we do at the NZCEL is, we are finding practical ways how to implement sustainability at the various levels of law, domestically, internationally, and so forth. And we have done it, I think, quite successfully. So, let's just give you an example regarding New Zealand. New Zealand was the first country back in 1991 to incorporate the concept of sustainability into its leading environmental law called the Resource Management Act. And what it means there is that rephrasing someone, the purpose of this description of this act is to allow any sorts of activities within society and within an economic system, as long as the fundamental integrity of ecological systems are not affected. And this is a nice capture of what sustainability really means. It means the duty of states to protect and preserve the integrity of earth ecological systems. That was for the first time incorporated into the Rio Declaration, 1992. And so ever since we have been working on this, and we have done this, once internationally in the form of being a founding research center, that formed the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law, which is really the global umbrella organization for all environmental law scholars and environmental law research centers. So that has been a very gratifying experience. We're working obviously, with research centers around the world, all in pursuit of basically transforming our current system of rather fragmented environment law. So that's what we are doing.

Kimberly White

That's really interesting. And New Zealand has been at the forefront, 

leading globally with climate law and what you guys are doing, that's fantastic. You’re the Co-Chair of the Scientific Committee of the Common Home of Humanity. Now, one of the main innovations that CHH has brought for public and academic discussion was conceptualizing one global common without borders, the earth system. As a professor and expert in international environmental law, how do you see the concrete legal solution that goes beyond the soft law declarations?

Klaus Bosselmann

Yeah, the notion of a global common without borders is a real challenge to the existing system of international law. We are more familiar with global commons in plural, acknowledging areas outside national jurisdictions such as oceans, Antarctica, the atmosphere. The notion of global commons harbors a certain duty, a degree of moral duty in terms of stewardship or guardianship. It has further been expressed in the notion of common heritage of humankind, which acknowledges a shared responsibility for areas that are subject to common heritage. So there is a certain familiarity with the notion of global commons. And as such, it can be incrementally implemented in international law. Now, when it comes to singular, global common without borders, this is the real challenge. And, of course, it's a reflection of earth as a whole and a physical reality, a spiritual reality, and yet, the law has largely been ignorant of this phenomenon called earth or mother earth. The closest thing that lawyers tend to accept as a description of reality can probably be described as the earth condominium, right? The idea that sovereign states, they own little apartments in a huge condominium that they all share just a situation that we have you rent an apartment, or you even own an apartment. But you also have to take care of the overall house that, you know, your apartment only forms part off. And this image tells us that by virtue of being interested in protecting your own apartment dash country, you need to have followed the logic of wanting also a healthy apartment next door. And furthermore, the functioning of the entire building that your apartment sits in. So this stipulates the need or sort of articulates very nicely what states by virtue of being part in this complex system called planet earth are up to and what their responsibilities really are, they need to go past responsibilities that you have as neighbors, right sort of one state to the others, we need to have common responsibilities for the global common is this notion is, is articulating this. So this is the new challenge, and of course, has been expressed in some ways, some way or other, not necessarily in soft law declarations per se, but in a number of international documents. And of course, the discussion continues, and it is very exciting to see some developments in that area. 

Kimberly White

Absolutely. So what exactly does this mean in terms of the history of international law?

Klaus Bosselmann

Yes, this is the heart of the matter is that international law is, of course, a legal construct, defining the relationships between sovereign states. So the assumption is that somehow the 189 or so current existing sovereign states can sort out all matters through this vehicle called, quote, international law. And this means they're using a notion of state sovereignty that has a certain history. In fact, it was created under the Westphalian peace treaty from 1648 and served the main purpose that states in Europe at the time ought to recognize each other's sovereignty in order to respect each other so that the citizens of one given country can be protected by their own government without fearing the threat of being attacked by people from a neighboring country. So historically, the concept of state sovereignty was all meant to provide a certain peace order, and that's all very well, even though, as you all know, hasn't very well functioned in practice, but nevertheless, the principle of state sovereignty has its absolute legitimacy. However, what do you do in a situation when these sovereign states discover a problem that cannot be dealt with with a pure notion of a sovereign state? This is a phenomenon that we all share the natural environment. The environment does not know any national boundaries. And in fact, we are talking about one global environment or the earth system. And this is what the idea of state sovereignty is not geared for is not invented for. We today speak of the sovereignty paradox, and this describes a situation that we are finding ourselves with a legal construct that is largely outdated because it does not inherently cater for shared responsibilities and, you know, enforceable responsibility of a sovereign state towards the global environment, yet, the well-being of each state and their citizens of course, it utterly depends on the so-called fun...