Blog

The Great Ape Project: A First Step toward International Recognition of the Rights of Nature?

Vancouver's climate change accountability motion

On June 24, 2019, twenty-eight law professors from across Canada issued an open letter urging local governments to explore legal and other avenues to hold major fossil fuel companies accountable for climate change-related damage to public property. Professor Stepan Wood, Director of the UBC Centre for Law and the Environment, submitted the letter to the Vancouver City Council, which is considering a motion instructing Mayor Kennedy Stewart to do three things...

A conference by Students for Mining Justice: "Protecting the Land: Communities, Law and the Mining Industry"

Book Launch: The Constitution of the Environmental Emergency

The Canada Research Chair in Law, Society & Sustainability and the Centre for Law and the Environment present the book launch of "The Constitution of the Environmental Emergency" by Jocelyn Stacey, with remarks by the author, Dean Catherine Dauvergne and Professors Mary Liston and Stepan Wood.

Workshop: NAFTA's Environmental Submissions Process & Public Engagement

Learn about the history of the CEC and NAFTA's environmental submissions process, and engage in a roundtable discussion on the role of public engagement, including submissions related to the effective enforcement of environmental law in Canada.

New Zealand's Resource Management Act: Guiding Light or Out of Date?

When it was enacted in 1991, New Zealand's Resource Management Act was hailed as world-leading. It integrated decision-making around many topics — land use planning, air quality, freshwater, coastal-marine issues, landscape protection, and many others. All of this happened under what was then still a normatively progressive umbrella of "sustainable management". Yet the RMA was the product of a particular set of social, economic, political and environmental circumstances. Since 1991, some of those things have changed.