WOR 340 Nature’s Trust 4 I’m Peter Neill, Director of the World Ocean Observatory. When we find a failure of governance or the regulatory systems, we have always as recourse taking the issue to court to apply the legal tools of law. We know that judicial principle and precedent can be a basis for an argument intended to redress wrong and restore justice. If you accept that the principles on which American environmental law was based in the 1970’s has been compromised to dilute protections, regulations, and enforcements to an unacceptable circumstance, then we have but one tactic to fall back on, lawsuits to force the issue, re-assert the principles, and reverse the destructive trend. And that is exactly what some citizens in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere have chosen to do. In the Netherlands, some 990 Dutch citizens have filed suit against their government for “failing to effectively cut greenhouse gas missions and curb climate change.” According to the website Climate Progress, “The plaintiffs will ask the court to force the Dutch government to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by between 25 and 40 percent relative to their 1990 levels by 2020… Currently, the European Union has committed to reducing its emissions 40 percent by 2030, but the Netherlands has not made any specific commitments, saying instead that it intends to adopt any international agreement that comes from the Paris climate talks later this year.” The class action was supported by the Urgenda Foundation, a Dutch organization devoted to sustainability and climate advocacy. The Netherlands is certainly vulnerable to extreme weather and sea level rise; indeed have been leaders for centuries in the design and construction of dykes and coastal to protect the 25% of the national land mass that is below or at sea level. The urgency of the changing circumstance has not been lost on the Dutch government and various new schemes to innovate and protect against further inundation have been put forward. But the plaintiffs argue that that same government has been not aggressive enough in addressing the root problem, requiring much stricter emission controls and faster shift to alternative and renewable energy generation. The judicial proceedings will take place over the coming months, and Urgenda is mobilizing publicity and support from citizens in Holland and throughout the European Union. A similar movement has been quietly underway in the United States led by the Oregon-based not-for-profit Our Children’s Trust, a “youth-driven, global climate recovery program, securing the legal right to a healthy atmosphere and stable climate.” The organization, along with five individual teenagers, and two other non-profit organization representing thousands more, partnered to bring as federal suit to the US Supreme Court designed “to require the federal government to immediately plan for national climate recovery that will restore our atmosphere to 350 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 by the end of the century… . This lawsuit relies upon the long-established legal principle of the Public Trust Doctrine, which requires our government to protect and maintain survival resources for future generations.” On December 8, 2014, the Court declined to hear the case, and Our Children’s Trust responded as follows: “Our Children’s Trust has been building new federal cases on behalf of youth to secure science-based climate recovery policy nationally, and will return to the Supreme Court if necessary. We will expand our efforts to enforce individual states’ responsibilities to preserve the atmosphere for the benefit of future generations, and we will advance select global and local efforts to do the same. Piecemeal legislative and executive actions not based on nature’s laws will simply never get us where we need to be…” OCT is pursuing legal remedies in State courts with some successes. Cases are pending in New Mexico, Oregon, Massachusetts, Colorado, Washington, and North Carolina, with courts in Alaska, Texas, Arizona, Kansas, Montana, and Pennsylvania issuing developmental decisions along the way on which the pending suits are based. The courts have validated critical climate science and reserved for the courts the exclusive right to determine whether a particular commons resource is protected by the Public Trust Doctrine for the benefit of present and future generations, and whether there has been a breach of that trust.” We need a children’s crusade based on the Public Trust Doctrine to take back our future with Nature. With this work, in the U.S. and abroad, the crusade has already begun. We will discuss these issues, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
