What Can International Climate Law Learn from Plankton and Penguins?

About

The Multispecies Collective Dialogue Series is our series of events that shines a spotlight on non-members’ research or practice toward multispecies flourishing. In this dialogue, Dr Mai explores how international climate law might begin to register more-than-human temporalities – those distant pasts, deep futures, and multispecies rhythms that shape planetary processes and enable more-than-human lives. While geological archives and affective encounters offer fleeting access to these unfamiliar and strange temporal scales, legal frameworks continue to privilege human-centred notions of time. In the context of international climate law, for instance, symbolic references to ecosystems and invocations of ‘Mother Earth’ have not unsettled tacitly inscribed anthropocentric assumptions. Drawing on two narratives – of plankton sedimentation that produced the fertile grounds of the U.S. Black Belt and a penguin colony in Sydney harbour – this talk shows how human and other-than-human temporalities are entangled and why legal responses to climate change must begin to register these temporal relations. It argues that because human perception and embodied experience of time is unavoidably anthropocentric, the project of recognising more-than-human temporalities does not consist of transcending the anthropocentric horizon but to acknowledge its limitations. From this starting point, the task becomes one of engaging these limits as openings to develop ways for legal norms and processes to knot together human and other-than-human times.

This research dialogue is hybrid format taking place in person (with coffee and cake!) and online. It follows a roundtable format: a brief welcome, 15 minute presentation by Dr Mai, 10 minute intervention by our invited discussant Dr Veerle Platvoet, and a 30 minute discussion/Q&A with all attendees.

Please register to attend. If you are attending online, joining details will be shared when you receive your ticket.

Speakers

PRESENTER

Dr Laura Mai is an interdisciplinary socio-legal scholar working at the intersections of international and transnational law, climate change, digital technologies, and the politics of what has been referred to as the ‘Anthropocene’. Laura has published in the Leiden Journal of International Law, Transnational Environmental Law, Global Policy, and Global Environmental Politics (amongst others). Her monograph In A State of Change is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Laura currently works on her research project Legal Geographies of Climate Change at the University of Amsterdam, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Laura holds a PhD from King’s College London and an LLM from the University of Cambridge. Outside of academia, Laura has worked as a solicitor in London, Brussels, and Hong Kong and served as a consultant for the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat. 

DISCUSSANT

Dr Veerle Platvoet is senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. Veerle conducts research on wildlife law, international environmental law, and animal law. Veerle is also co-editor in chief at the Global Journal of Animal Law, co-founding member of the Helsinki Animal Law Centre and board member of the Dutch Society of Animal Rights Law

CHAIR

Dr Iyan Offor is an assistant professor in environmental law and sustainable development at the University of Birmingham and founding leader of the Multispecies Collective. Iyan is a critical socio-legal theorist conducting interdisciplinary research on multispecies legalities. His active research projects are: Solarpunk Narrative and Multispecies (Legal) Worlding; and Transqueer Ecological Justice. Iyan recently published his monograph Global Animal Law from the Margins. Iyan is editor for the Journal of International Wildlife Law & Policy and academic consultant for the UK Centre for Animal Law.

Hosts

The Multispecies Collective

The Multispecies Collective is a research group led by Birmingham Law School’s Dr Iyan Offor. The Multispecies Collective is a collaborative group of researchers working together with practitioners to create knowledge, theory and practice for positive change toward futures of flourishing for animals, nature and society. The collective’s work is guided by considerations of: multispecies flourishing, linking theory and practice, change-and future-oriented ways of working, interdisciplinary, and plural thinking. The collective aims to produce research and practice, maintain a community space, manage and connect with a network, share resources and generate impact all in the pursuit of multispecies flourishing. The collective connects with its network through its reading group, dialogue series, research showcase, and hosting platform. It manages a visiting research programme, PhD programme, and other opportunities.

BLS Environment & Sustainability Research Theme

The Environment & Sustainability Research Theme brings together Birmingham Law School researchers within the broad area of environment and sustainability, investigating how law can secure environmental justice—from intergenerational rights to multispecies flourishing—while turning research into real-world change. The theme creates space for cross-fertilisation of ideas to avoid treating environmental issues in siloes, applying a plurality of interdisciplinary perspectives including interactions between the sciences, the humanities and the social sciences. The theme's research is guided by four overarching enquiries into: environmental justice, care and theory; environmental conservation, preservation and natural resources; environmental risk, harm and regulation; and environmental law, protection and other regimes. The theme hosts various research projects and networks within this remit, connecting with its network via a research discussion series and other events.