Environmental Science 7899 – Issues in Environmental Sciences
Watch the live seminar remotely via CarmenConnect
Seminar Chair: Gil Bohrer, bohrer.17@osu.edu
Seminar Coordinators: Michelle Smith, straley.23@osu.edu; Yanting Guo, zhao.1093@osu.edu
Course Requirements
This course is graded S/U. Satisfactory participation in this course includes all of the following:
- Attentive and active participation in lectures and discussion.
- Attendance at all classes, with one excused absence. If you must miss more than one class, see Dr. Bohrer.
- Advance reading for any seminars for which it is required
Delinking International Environmental Law and Climate Change
By Dr. Cinnamon Carlarne, The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, Columbus, OH 43210
In this talk, I will explore the existing paradigm in international law that frames global efforts to address climate change as a problem of and for international environmental law. The most recent climate reports tell us that warming is unequivocal and that we are already experiencing the impacts of climate change at the domestic level in the United States. Against this backdrop, much has been written recently in the United States about domestic efforts to address climate change. These efforts are important, but they leave open the question of how the global community can work together to address the greatest collective action problem of our time. Focusing on international efforts to address climate change, in this talk I will push back against the dominant framing of global climate change as a problem of and for international environmental law and argue that the static nature of the existing global paradigm brings about two primary harms. First, the failure to address climate change overshadows the larger field of international environmental law in a way that inhibits efforts to address a suite of persistent environmental problems beyond climate change. Second, framing climate change as a traditional environmental law problem constrains efforts to think more creatively about how to address a problem that defies classification as an environmental issue and demands innovative governance approaches. In making the legal case for delinking the debates about international environmental law and global climate change, I argue that challenging the existing global paradigm is critical to thinking more constructively about collective action in the climate context.
Professor Cinnamon Piñon Carlarne is a leading expert in environmental law and climate change law and policy. Prior to joining the Moritz faculty, she was an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law. Carlarne’s scholarship focuses on the evolution of system of domestic and international environmental governance and includes a book on comparative climate change law and policy with Oxford University Press; a series of journal articles and book chapters exploring questions of domestic and international environmental law; and a forthcoming textbook on seas, society, and human well-being.
