The need for effective climate action is clear. However, progress is slow and the window of opportunity to avoid the worst impacts of climate change is closing. To address the opportunity from a legal perspective, Queen’s Law brought together legal scholars from Canada and the U.S. for a December 1-2 conference titled “Institutions for Effective Climate Action: An International & Comparative Perspective.”
Abstracts:
Lindsay Borrows
Indigenous Legal Institutions and Climate Change Response in Canada
For Indigenous peoples, the future of climate change is now. Indigenous peoples have lived experience with climate change over many generations given the inherent dynamism of geology and ecology, as well as human-caused changes resulting in species-loss, migrations, and environmental degradation. Indigenous peoples own legal institutions have continually adapted to respond to these climate challenges. With over 60 Indigenous legal orders in Canada, Indigenous peoples are contributing significantly to the ecological governance landscape including large-scale matters like climate change. Importantly, Indigenous legal institutions are non-state centred, and draw from precedent sourced in their stories, language(s), land-based practices, ceremonies, treaty practices and knowledge-keepers. These legal resources support nuanced responses to climate change and provide processes to work through internal and external conflicts that inevitably arise in the messy work of decision-making. Indigenous legal institutions are an important part of climate law and policy in Canada (and globally).
Arden Rowell
Building Psychologically Informed Climate Institutions
Research in law and psychology suggests that the harms of climate change may be difficult for humans to perceive, understand, and value. These challenges flow both from the general environmental quality of many climate injuries---which tend to be diffuse across space and time, complex, and nonhuman in character---and from the distinctively global and systemic impacts of climate change, which may trigger psychological phenomena that undermine processing of extreme-magnitude and foreign impacts. A psychological account of climate neglect may help clarify how and why legal institutions have generally under-responded to climate threats; how private actors may sincerely if inaccurately underestimate their own role in causing climate harms; and how private citizens may even generally underestimate their own vulnerability (while simultaneously under perceiving threats to others). Recognizing these challenges may help in structuring future institutions and institutional response with a greater chance of success.
Sophie Thériault
Green Colonialism at the “Critical” Minerals Frontiers: Towards a Just Energy Transition for Indigenous Peoples
In Canada, as in other countries, energy transition strategies to address the climate crisis have led to increased interest in ‘critical’ or ‘strategic’ minerals – such as graphite, cobalt, lithium, and nickel – needed for batteries, electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines. Many of Canada’s ‘critical-mineral-rich’ areas are located in the northern part of the country, home to several Indigenous communities that are already disproportionately affected by climate change and the legacy of past and present mining activities. This chapter examines the ways in which dominant governmental and industry discourses on ‘critical’ or ‘strategic’ minerals as an imperative for ‘green’ energy transitions reproduce and reinforce pre-existing settler colonial processes of dispossession. We argue that ‘just’ energy transitions should respond efficiently to the climate crisis in ways that promotes the territorial rights and self-determination of Indigenous peoples according to their own legal orders and conceptions of environmental justice.
