Climate change and investment treaty arbitration:
Barriers and opportunities to climate action.
10:30 - 11:30
CCRC Seminar Room
Level 4, Mathews Building, UNSW Sydney
The seminar will be chaired by Associate Professor Jonathan Bonnitcha (UNSW Law & Justice) and feature a talk from Professor Lauge Poulsen (University College London), who chairs OECD's work-programme on climate policy and investment treaties. The talk will be followed by reflections from ICRR Chief Investigators Associate Professor Kristle Romero Cortes (UNSW Business School), who researches financial intermediation and the structure, optimization, and regulatory practices of the financial services industry, and Gillian Moon (UNSW Law & Justice and Australia Human Rights Institute) who is the Project Lead for the Australian Climate Accountability Project.
Article 2.1(c) of the Paris Agreement commits governments to align global finance flows with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development. This seminar will assess the role of investment treaties; a controversial, but little-understood, part of the regulatory infrastructure for global finance flows. Investment treaties allow foreign investors to pursue compensation claims against governments through international arbitration, sometimes for billions of dollars. Fossil fuel investors are particularly active users of investment treaty arbitration and there are mounting concerns that the global investment treaty regime is unaligned with the goals of the Paris Agreement. IPCC has highlighted investment treaty arbitration as a possible barrier to climate action and the treaties recently featured in UNFCCC's discussions on the scope of article 2.1 (c) of the Paris Agreement.
