News & Events

Research Workshop on Legal protection of carbon sinks in the fight against climate change: interactions between ecosystem protection and human rights

ENVREG member and PhD Candidate, Alessandra Accogli, is organising, with the support of the UCD Sutherland School of Law and supervisor Amrei Muller, a Research Workshop entitled ‘Legal protection of carbon sinks in the fight against climate change: interactions between ecosystem protection and human rights’. The workshop will be held on 4-5 December 2023 at UCD Sutherland School of Law (Dublin, Ireland).

The workshop is centred on the legal protection of carbon sinks and aims to offer a selected group of academics and practitioners a forum to analyse and discuss the role of carbon sinks in climate change mitigation from a legal perspective. While there is consensus in the literature on the importance of carbon sinks in addressing climate change, this scientific understanding of carbon sinks in the carbon cycle rarely translates into legal research. At the same time, ecosystems that act as carbon sinks are often subject to human uses (e.g. land use activities) leading to their degradation and the release of the stored carbon back into the atmosphere. While restrictions on such uses aim, on the one hand, to limit the degradation of ecosystems and to ensure their conservation, on the other hand, they can have an impact on the human rights of those whose livelihoods or culture are linked to the natural habitat and its resources. Simultaneously, human rights may be affected by ecosystem degradation itself. Therefore, the workshop intends to address the tensions and synergies between the interest in protecting and restoring carbon sinks and the human rights at stake in ecosystem management and to promote legal approaches that allow synergies to be realised in tackling climate change, ecosystem degradation and human rights violations in an integrated fashion.

If you are interested in attending the workshop, please contact the organisers at (opens in a new window)alessandra.accogli@ucdconnect.ie. More information about the programme and invited speakers will be shared in due course.

Complicating Rights of Nature

Thursday, 25 May 2023

10:00 am – 5:00 pm

Harty Boardroom, Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin

ENVREG’s members Amanda Byer and Alessandra Accogli are organising a one-day workshop titled ‘Complicating Rights of Nature’. Convening a wide range of scholars, the event intends to critically discuss the concept of Rights of Nature (RoN) in international law and its achievements, while exploring strategies for expanding its paradigm to include diverse and sustainable ideas about nature.

The event will be opened by a video presentation by Keynote Speaker Mr Thomas Linzey (Senior Legal Counsel, Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, USA).

Invited guest speakers include:

• Dr Daphina Misiedjan, Assistant Professor in Human Rights and the Environment, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands
• Dr Oluwabusayo Wuraola, Lecturer in Law at Anglia Ruskin University, United Kingdom
• Dr Peter Doran, Senior Lecturer, Queen’s University Belfast and founder of Environmental Justice Network Ireland, Northern Ireland
• Dr Devin Beaulieu, Anthropologist, co-founder and Director of the Instituto de Estudios Jurídicos Indígenas y Originarios in Sucre, Bolivia
• Dr Bróna MacNeil, PhD researcher, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland
• Mr Julian Suarez, PhD candidate, University College Cork, Ireland
• Mrs Niamh Guiry, PhD candidate, University College Cork, Ireland

The event will take place on Thursday, 25 May 2023 and it will be hosted by UCD Sutherland School of Law with generous financial support of the Earth Institute, the Environmental Regulation Research Group and the Property [In]Justice Project.

Due to limited number of places available, if you are interested in attending the event, please contact the organisers at (opens in a new window)amanda.byer@ucd.ie and (opens in a new window)alessandra.accogli@ucdconnect.ie.

Call for Papers

Research Workshop

Legal protection of carbon sinks in the fight against climate change: interactions between ecosystem protection and human rights

ENVREG member and PhD Candidate, Alessandra Accogli, is organising, with the support of the UCD Sutherland School of Law, a Research Workshop entitled ‘Legal protection of carbon sinks in the fight against climate change: interactions between ecosystem protection and human rights’. Paper proposals are invited for presentation at the research workshop which will be held on 4-5 December 2023 at UCD Sutherland School of Law (Dublin, Ireland).

The workshop intends to offer academics and practitioners a forum to analyse and discuss how the legal response to climate change could be enhanced through the protection and restoration of those ecosystems that act as carbon sinks. A carbon sink is a natural reservoir that absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere than it releases, thus exercising a cooling effect on the climate. However, albeit acknowledged by climate change policies and legal instruments, the carbon sink capacity of ecosystems has been significantly undermined, leading to the degradation of ecosystems and the release of the stored carbon, thus exacerbating climate change. Moreover, the scientific understanding of the importance of carbon sinks for tackling climate change has rarely translated into legal research that can impact action at policy level. What is also lacking in the legal literature is the analysis of issues relating to climate change, ecosystem degradation and human rights taken together. Human rights come into play as they could be impacted both by climate change and ecosystem degradation as well as by measures taken to combat them. A holistic perspective focused on protecting both nature and human interests would tie the fight against climate change and ecosystem degradation to other struggles for justice. This theoretical framework, often referred to as socio-ecological perspective or ecological law, essentially advocates for laws that place human beings as interconnected parts with non-humans in complex ecosystems and are based on the protection of these ecosystems and their components in an integrated fashion. Such an approach disrupts the human and nature divide and considers the healthy interaction of all components of ecosystems, including human beings.

In light of the foregoing, the workshop aims at bringing carbon sinks and their potential for climate mitigation to the legal forum and, in doing so, intends to promote legal approaches inspired by socio-ecological perspectives that allow for realising synergies in addressing climate change, ecosystem degradation and human rights violations.

More concretely, contributors might wish to address the following topics and questions (the list is not exhaustive):

• Critical analysis of the current legal response to climate change
• How do carbon sinks feature within the current climate change legal regime at international/EU/domestic levels (e.g., Paris Agreement, EU LULUCF Reg etc.)?
• How are carbon sinks protected under the current legal regime – beyond climate change law (e.g., environmental law, nature conservation law, human rights law)? (Submissions concerning the designation of protected areas under the EU Habitats Directive are particularly welcome). Submissions could look at both the substantive and procedural dimensions (e.g., Aarhus Convention etc.).
• Does the current legal regime (e.g., climate change law, environmental law, human rights law) promote synergies with ecosystem protection and/or human rights protection? If so, to what extent?
• How are human rights impacted by climate change and/or ecosystem degradation? How are human rights affected by measures aimed at addressing climate change and/or ecosystem degradation?
• Discussion on the possible legal approaches to enhance the response to climate change
• How should the current legal response to climate change be enhanced through the protection and restoration of carbon sinks?
• How could human rights law help design effective responses to climate change (or ecosystem degradation)?
• What are the tensions/conflicts as well as the synergies between the environmental protection of carbon sinks and the protection of human rights of people who interact with the ecosystem(s)? How are/can the former be solved?
• How can ecological law help make the current legal response to climate change more holistic?

Interested contributors are asked to submit a title and an abstract of around 400 words to (opens in a new window)alessandra.accogli@ucdconnect.ie by 9 June 2023. Selected contributors will then be asked to submit extended abstracts (max 1,000 words) or, if they wish for their submission to be considered for publication, their full papers (between 8,000-10,000 words) written in English by 15 October 2023. The workshop will be an in-person event at UCD Sutherland School of Law (Dublin, Ireland), with a subsidiary option for remote participation. Some funds are available to cover travel and accommodation, and selected contributors will be asked if they wish to avail of these funds. Finally, selected contributions presented at the workshop may be considered for publication.