18 July 2025
Quantifying Fair Share Carbon Budgets
An obligation to quantify each country’s fair share of the remaining global carbon budget associated with limiting global heating to 1.5°C flows from the judgment in KlimaSeniorinnen. While there will naturally be debate about what represents a country’s fair share – the EU’s independent advisory body ESAB recently considered a range of fair share principles and concluded that the EU’s fair share has already been used up under many of these – the obligation to quantify fair share budgets should, in our view, be the subject of a reduced margin of appreciation consistent with KlimaSeniorinnen. Continue reading >>
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11 April 2024
The Meaning of Carbon Budget within a Wide Margin of Appreciation
Although the KlimaSeniorinnen judgment discusses a number of rights of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), including Article 6 (right of access to a court), Article 2 (right to life), and Article 13 (right to an effective remedy), the focus of this blog post is on its discussion of Article 8 (right to private, home and family life). The question raised by that discussion is whether the judgment is one that will “frighten the horses” and lead to oppositional cries of judicial overreach around the separation of powers, or if it is more an unexceptional case of “move on, nothing to see here.” My argument is that the judgment is mostly the latter but that it has what, in computer gaming terms, is known as an “Easter egg” – a hidden element included by the developers to surprise and reward those who look carefully. That could turn out to be more controversial. Continue reading >>
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