Copenhagen, Denmark

Negotiating Regulatory Responses to Foreseeable Climate Tragedy

This course focuses on the current status of international climate change regulation in regards to climate change adaptation and the ways in which policy impacts the content of international instruments. In particular, the course will centre on clarifying and exploring the notion of loss and damage (relating to compensation for climate change impacts), as introduced into international law on climate change by Article 8 of the Paris Agreement. In order for students to gain an understanding of these issues, the course will first of all take the form of a negotiation game, with students being divided into groups, each taking a specific role in the negotiation (for example, one group playing the USA, another playing China). Students will be expected to engage with each other with the purpose of jointly drafting a text across teams, such as a draft protocol or agreement, which as fully as possible reflects their respective party’s interests. The culmination of the game is the final negotiation session, during which a final text (protocol or agreement) is to be adopted through unanimous approval.



The negotiation game will be based on required readings and will be complemented by a series of thematic lectures given by Professor Morten Broberg and PhD fellow Linnéa Nordlander, as well as guest lecturers. The thematic lectures will cover topics such as the interplay between climate change and international regulation and the actual implementation of international climate change instruments at national or local level. Moreover, site visits to relevant institutions will be done, to provide students with practical insight into how climate negotiations and implementation of climate regulation is conducted.

Target group

Master students

Course aim

Knowledge:
•Knowledge about contemporary insights into climate change – including the different predictions of future climate change.
•Knowledge about the different models for how climate change may affect societies (including knowledge about `multiplier models' and models based on `point of no return' as well as `tipping points').
•Knowledge about the (existing) principal international legal measures for addressing climate change (in particular the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change/UNFCCC) as well as how these measures operate (eg. that the UNFCCC is a framework convention).
•Knowledge about the interplay between regulation and climate change.
•Knowledge about the interaction (or lack of interaction) between international legal measures and actual implementation at the national/local level (including the question of `enforcement' of international legal measures).


Skills:
•Ability to analyse a societal challenge (posed by climate change) with a view to identifying measures that may counter these challenges.
•Ability to identify and distinguish regulatory and non-regulatory aspects of a societal challenge.
•The ability to identify interdisciplinary approaches, methodologies and analyses – while at the same time paying particular attention to their possibilities and limitations.
•Ability to construct (and to de-construct) a legal argument.
•Ability to argue `pro et con' of different regulatory solutions to a specific challenge.
•Ability to identify short-comings (between the available measures and stated objective) within a given regulatory framework.



Competences:
•Ability to develop a policy to address a specific societal challenge – and to identify the regulatory and non-regulatory aspects inherent in this policy (`non-regulatory' refers to for example cultural issues).
•Ability to draft a regulatory response towards a well-defined societal challenge.
•Ability to apply comparative approaches to complex problems (for example by searching for existing responses to a given/similar challenge and thereupon draw on this/these responses as well as on the experience already gained with regards to this/these responses when developing a response to the specific challenge the student is now faced with).
•Ability to identify ways that may remedy short-comings (eg. underpinning the `classical legal measures' by fiscal measures).
•Ability to communicate regulatory challenges and regulatory solutions in a precise language and in a way that is both structured and coherent.
•Ability to consider the ethical aspects of the solution(s) that has/have been developed.

Fee info

DKK 7500: EU/EEA citizens
DKK 9375: Non-EU/EEA citizens