Description

International law includes treaty and customary norms. Most of the literature on climate change and international law focuses on the climate regime proper (the UNFCCC and other treaties adopted under its aegis, such as the Paris Agreement) or, sometimes, on other treaty regimes (e.g. ICAO). Relevant norms of customary international law include the no-harm principle and, as secondary norms, the law of State responsibility. Customary international law has generally attracted much less attention in scholarly works on the international law on climate change. This, it seems, is because of the erroneous assumption that specific treaty rules automatically exclude the applicability of customary norms. Prof. Mayer will argue for a broader approach of the international law on climate change which would account for customary as well as treaty law.

About The Speaker

Mr. Benoit Mayer is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He worked previously at the Research Institute in Environmental Law in the School of Law of Wuhan University, China. He studied in Sciences Po Lyon, the Sorbonne University, McGill University and the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on the international law on climate change, in particular with regard to human mobility, loss and damage, and adaptation. He is the author of The International Law on Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and of The Concept of Climate Migration: Advocacy and its Prospects (Edward Elgar, 2016). He is also the co-editor of the Research Handbook on Climate Change, Migration and the Law (Edward Elgar, forthcoming in 2017) and of Critical International Law: Postrealism, Postcolonialism, and Transnationalism (Oxford University Press, 2014).