Legal Criteria for an Equitable Fossil Fuel Phaseout

Project description

This interdisciplinary project, which engages with climate science, law and legal theory aims to identify the role of law and legal principles to be applied when developing an equitable global fossil fuel phaseout.

Primary participants

Principal Investigators:

Dr Kim Bouwer, Assistant Professor, Durham Law School

Dr Daria Shapovalova, Aberdeen Law School

Dr Matteo Fermeglia, University of Amsterdam

The need to ensure climate change stays within safe limits entails that serious restrictions are placed on fossil fuel extraction. The world has more fossil fuels than can safely be used, which raises questions as to which can be extracted and which must be left ‘in the ground’.

Where theoretical assumptions for the equitable distribution of burdens and action for the production of fossil fuels are being developed and discussed, a principle-based legal framework for this is currently missing.

The starting point for a legal analysis in this context is: can law and legal principles help us understand what equity means in the context of regulating fossil fuels production, and what role do legal principles play in achieving an equitable phase out? We use law and theories of equity to answer these questions.

Equity is or should be central to the way in which the global community addresses the challenge of climate change. This is the case because it is an inherently good thing to be fair, but also because international regimes which are fair are more likely to be effective. Accordingly, principles of justice and equity must apply in relation to the legal regime(s) that develop in order to constrain the extraction and use of fossil fuels, which are fundamental to achieving the goals of the climate regime. The driving assumption of this project is that a fully equitable legal framework to govern fossil fuel production can be grounded in existing legal principles and theories. In this project, the meaning of equity for fossil fuel phase-out through the lens of legal principles will be examined. Various models and measures proposed across disciplines for fossil fuel phase-out taking into account an equity framework will be interrogated and the constraints or opportunities law and legal principles can present to them.

The main aim of the project is to explore equity questions in relation to the fossil fuel phaseout and management of fossil fuels production, always with law being the starting point in terms of the meaning of equity and how to make equity happen.