Climate Change Activities Report

For more than 15 years, ELI has addressed the challenges of climate change. ELI activities address the causes of climate change, strengthen capacity to adapt, improve governance, integrate climate change into invasive species strategies, advance technologies, and answer constitutional challenges to new initiatives for climate change.

ELI’s publications and seminars provide unique platforms for public discourse on various aspects of climate change, domestically and internationally. ELI’s flagship environmental law and policy publications, the Environmental Law Reporter and The Environmental Forum, as well as the National Wetlands Newsletter, publish leading experts from government, NGOs, and the private sector, as well as ELI staff. Illustrative articles include The Role of Carbon Sequestration in the U.S. Response to Climate Change — Challenges and Opportunities, co-authored by a former high-level official in the Clinton Administration, and published in ELR. In his Around the States column in The Environmental Forum, ELI Senior Attorney John Pendergrass regularly chronicles the efforts of states and local governments to deal with climate change in the absence of effective national action. ELI recently devoted an entire issue of the National Wetlands Newsletter to the issue of wetlands and climate change. Illustrative seminars include “Reporting on Climate Change: Understanding the Science,” “Lessons Learned for the Acid Rain Program Applicable to an Emission Cap and Allowance Trading System for Greenhouse Gases,” and “Access to Courts After Massachusetts v. EPA: Who Will be Left Standing?”

Climate change is also a key component of ELI’s Ocean Program and International Water Program, and of our domestic and international work on land and biodiversity, as well as ELI’s work to promote technology for sustainable development. ELI develops and improves legal frameworks that are practical and feasible; convenes stakeholders to identify solutions and build consensus; and hosts programs that build the capacity of government officials, private actors, and community groups.

Recent Activities

• In November 2007, ELI organized an event in partnership with South Africa’s Northwest University on Climate Change and Adaptive Governance in the Southern African Water Sector.
• In November 2007, ELI Staff Attorney Sandra Nichols gave a presentation on “Adaptation to Sea Level Rise: Federal and State Approaches” at the Ninth Annual Northeast Florida Environmental Summit, Rising to the Challenge: Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies to Combat the Impacts of Sea Level Rise. Florida Coastal School of Law Summit Website / ELI’s Presentation.
• In July of 2007, Maryland appointed ELI to serve on the Adaptation and Response Working Group of the Maryland Climate Change Commission.