Environmental Law Collaborative’s Response to the IPCC Fifth Assessment

Environmental Law Reporter announced this week that its January 2015 issue of News & Analysis includes a collaborative piece by several leading environmental law professors–including Touro Law Prof and Land Use & Sustainable Development Law Institute Director Sarah Adams-Schoen.

A Response to the IPCC Fifth Assessment

45 ELR 10027 (2015)

by Sarah J. Adams-Schoen, Deepa Badrinarayana, Cinnamon Carlarne, Robin Kundis Craig, John C. Dernbach, Keith H. Hirokawa, Alexandra B. Klass, Katrina Fischer Kuh, Stephen R. Miller, Jessica Owley, Shannon Roesler, Jonathan Rosenbloom, Inara Scott, and David Takacs

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report presented significant data and findings about climate change. But the IPCC’s working groups’ summaries for policymakers avoid making normative statements about the IPCC’s findings. The authors, members of the Environmental Law Collaborative, bridge this gap by identifying the normative claims that stem from the working groups’ summaries to spark deeper discussion and help shape the IPCC’s sixth assessment.

You can read the abstract on ELR (and the entire article if you’re an ELR subscriber). Or, on SSRN, you can read the article and find other articles by the authors. According to the ELR website, ELR is “the most-often cited analysis of environmental, sustainability, natural resources, energy, toxic tort, and land use law and policy.”

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Vulnerable populations in the coastal floodplain

As we plan for future storms and rebuild from Hurricane Sandy, policy makers must consider the large population of vulnerable persons who live in coastal floodplains.   

According to NOAA, 16.4 million people resided in the US coastal floodplain in 2010 and that number appears to be increasing. 12% of the 2010 floodplain population is below the poverty level (excluding U.S. Territories) and 23% is under 5 and 65 and over (excluding U.S. Territories).

For more information, see National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Spatial Trends in Coastal Socioeconomics Demographic Trends Database: 1970-2010 (2012), available at http://coastalsocioeconomics.noaa.gov/.