Climate change and the rule of law: UCL Laws conference 31 March – 1 April 2022

The UCL Centre for Law and the Environment held a major two-day conference on Climate change and the rule of law at the UCL Faculty of Laws in London in spring 2022. Recordings of the sessions and the full conference programme will be made available on this webpage shortly. A series of blogs can be found on the Climate Change and the Rule of Law page.

Our  delegates enjoyed thought-provoking presentations on an exceptionally rich topic, which we are very far from having exhausted.

Core themes

Through the conference papers and deliberations, a number of themes stood out. First, the complexity and difficulty of both climate change and the rule of law were abundantly apparent. The complexity goes beyond what might be the more obvious (but no less fascinating) complexities around jurisprudence, laws and physical impacts; both rule of law and climate change are whole-society, whole-legal system challenges, which support and are in tension with each other in myriad ways. Thus, whilst transformational policy change is required across all economic sectors and social domains, so the fundamental structures of the legal system in supporting and constructing economic and social life are in question in addressing climate change.

Second, uneven vulnerabilities were a recurring theme during the conference. Identifying winners and losers in climate change and responses to it is another complex and difficult exercise. The ways in which rule of law might help to overcome, or be complicit in reinforcing, those vulnerabilities, is a significant area for reflection. A connected theme is whether rule of law inhibits or enables collective action; climate change clearly requires collective action, so thinking through the sometimes individualistic legacy of rule of law is crucial.

Another dominant theme of the conference was the significance of the institutions of the rule of law for climate change, and vice versa. Some of our speakers powerfully expressed rule of law and its institutions as social achievements. Our precious institutions, as precious social achievements, need nurturing if we are to respond adequately to the climate crisis, but are so easily subject to neglect or attack.

Making hybrid work

Organising a conference on this scale (with ten sessions and over sixty speakers and chairs, from across the world) is always intensive work. Hybrid conferencing is additionally complex, and this conference included speakers, chairs and audience ‘in the room’ at UCL, as well as all around the world. This was partly about pandemic travel challenges, but doubled as an opportunity to pioneer lower-carbon conferencing. The future of global conferences will need to involve online participation if we are to be serious about net zero universities.

We are encouraged by the potential of the hybrid format, and we embraced its imperfections. The occasional hiccup with tech is not a barrier to coming together, and we may need to accept imperfect positioning of some papers to accommodate time zone differences. As an academic community we will need to keep learning to do this, and to do it better.

The most important lesson from our experience is that hybrid conferencing requires resources – in particular, the skills, expertise and significant time of our specialist events and educational media colleagues. We were very fortunate to be able to rely on UCL’s resources on this occasion. Going forward, however, funders, as well as universities, need to consider this. We value our global community, but flying people around the world is increasingly unacceptable and not always possible, and also requires financial and human resources.  The next step is to think about improving the conferencing experience for those who are online, to mitigate the two-tier experience – perhaps with contemporaneous regional hubs or events.

Image credit: © UCL Digital Media, 2020