TWAIL Climate Change and the North-South Divide.pdf

This chapter highlights the groundbreaking work of TWAIL-affiliated environmental law scholars on climate change.  The climate crisis has its origins in the Global North’s relentless quest for cheap energy, cheap labor, cheap raw materials, and cheap waste disposal through colonial and neocolonial interventions in the Global South. International law has played an essential role in justifying and facilitating the destruction of nature and the immiseration of Southern states and subaltern populations. It has done so not only through trade law, investment law, and finance law, but also through foundational doctrines such as property, sovereignty, and development. TWAIL-affiliated environmental law scholars have emphasized the systemic roots of the climate crisis and have critiqued the climate regime’s lack of ambition, its embrace of market mechanisms and technological fixes, its resistance to demands for climate justice, and its complicity with an economic system premised on unlimited growth on a finite planet. Given the shared roots of the climate crisis and other structural injustices, the chapter calls for greater engagement with climate change by TWAIL scholars who are not environmental law experts in order to destabilize the many bodies of law that enable the abuse of both humans and nature and threaten the future of life on the planet.