The Climate Masterclass
The risks and opportunities from climate change are relevant to clients across all legal sectors. In an era where the impacts of climate change are increasingly felt, the legal community has a pivotal role to play.
Recognising the urgent need for specialised training in these areas, the Climate Masterclass offers a comprehensive, on-demand, training package on many aspects of climate change and the law, delivered by leading Cornerstone Climate practitioners.
Designed to upskill and inform, the masterclass is for anyone in the legal profession seeking to deepen their understanding of climate change and its relevance to their practice.
What’s on Offer?
For £10 plus VAT, participants will gain access to an exceptional lineup of 16 hours of online training on topics including:
- Climate Change: The Basics
- UK Progress towards Net Zero
- The Energy Transition
- Carbon Capture, Use and Storage
- Climate Litigation in the Civil Courts
- Greenwashing and Ecocide
- ESG and Real Estate
- Green Finance
- Climate in Planning Policy and Plan Making
- Development Management: Climate as a Material Consideration
- Retrofitting Existing Buildings
- Ecocide
- The Right to Protest
- Human Rights and Climate Change
The Climate Masterclass is an unmissable opportunity for you to enhance your understanding and capacity to address the critical challenges of our time.
Purchase the Climate Masterclass here.
See the programme of learning below.
Programme
Introduction to Climate Change and the Law: the Basics
What is “net zero”? Is there such thing as “climate law”? How does national policy plan for the climate emergency?
Harriet Townsend, Jack Barber and Verity Bell introduce the key definitions, principles and frameworks involving climate change and the law, answering the questions you feel like you should know the answer to but have been too afraid to ask!
Policy-making: How to Plan for Net Zero
The recent Salt Cross Garden Village judicial review found that an Inspectors’ Report watering down the net zero policies in a draft Area Action Plan was unlawful.
Josef Cannon KC, Ruchi Parekh and Jack Barber analyse the decision, both as to its interesting procedural aspects but also as a jumping-off point to consider how we can plan for a net-zero future, exploring the kinds of policies that might be appropriate for inclusion in development plan documents.
ESG, Real Estate and Climate Change
Real Estate is where we will all experience the ESG agenda on a personal level, whether in our home, office, the shop or pub. It is a sector that is responsible for a quarter of GHG emissions in the UK and has a huge impact on how we function as a society. Estelle Dehon KC and Barny Evans, Sustainability Director at Turley, and learn how the Government is changing the ways our existing real estate evolves, and new developments are built. Barny will explain the detail and discuss some of the challenges that are still to be resolved.
Climate Change as a Material Consideration: Dead Letter or Burning Issue?
In this presentation, Cornerstone Climate members explore the relevance of climate change to decision-making in planning law. They cover a range of topics including:
- requirements of the NPPF and other Government policy statements
- the evolving legal position according to the English courts
- recent appeal decisions in which inspectors have had to confront this thorny but significant issue
With: Ryan Kohli, Alex Williams, and Rowan Clapp
Criminal and Regulatory Responses to Climate Change: Ecocide and Greenwashing
This session covers two rapidly developing areas of response to climate change in the criminal and regulatory arenas. Ecocide means unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts. The session will cover:
- The meaning of ecocide and how it might work in practice as a crime, including as a corporate crime;
- Proposals in England, Wales and Scotland, to introduce ecocide as a new criminal offence;
- Steps taken in Europe, including Belgium becoming the first state to recognise ecocide as an international crime and the vote by the EU to criminalise the most serious cases of environmental damage that are “comparable to ecocide”;
- The work at international level to include ecocide within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court
Greenwashing is the term applied to environmental claims, usually made by companies and organisations in the course of their promotional activities or in their corporate reporting, which wrongly create the impression that a product or service has a positive environmental impact or no impact on the environment. This has rapidly become a significant regulatory issue. The session will cover:
- The development of new rules in the UK and Europe, addressing greenwashing, both in legislation and through steps by regulators;
- Decisions in the UK by the Advertising Standards Agency (banning misleading green claims); the Competition and Markets Authority (taking enforcement action against greenwashing, particularly in the fashion industry) and the Financial Conduct Authority’s proposed package of new measures;
- Anti-greenwashing complaints to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development UK National Contact Point.
With: Gerard Forlin KC and Estelle Dehon KC
The Energy Transition: Renewables
A key aspect of addressing climate change is decarbonising the system of energy production. This session introduces the energy transition, asks what counts as a renewable technology and provides an overview of the legal and regulatory issues in the UK around rolling out the technology.
It covers:
- wind (onshore and offshore, fixed and floating);
- solar (ground and building mounted);
- tidal (stream and barrage);
- geothermal; and
- the contested renewables – nuclear and biomass.
With: Estelle Dehon KC, Ryan Kohli and Olivia Davies
Carbon Delivery Budget Plan: High Court Ruling
In a judgment handed down on 3 May, Mr Justice Sheldon upheld the judicial review challenge by Friends of the Earth, ClientEarth and the Good Law Project to the lawfulness of the Carbon Budget Delivery Plan (CBDP). The CBDP is required by the Climate Change Act 2008 (CCA) and it outlines how the Government considers its policies and proposals will enable the carbon budgets set under the CCA to be met. The carbon budgets represent critical staging posts on the path to net zero. With Rob Williams and Nina Pindham, who were both instructed in the case.
UK Progress Towards Net Zero
This training session examines the government’s strategies on achieving net zero, examining how these strategies are interconnected and their overall adequacy in addressing the challenges of sustainability. This session provides a thorough analysis of the government’s approach to the Net Zero Strategy (NZS), highlighting key policies and initiatives designed to propel the UK towards its climate goals.
Gain insights into the coherence of current strategies and explore expert opinions on whether these plans are sufficient for meeting the targets set forth.
With: Lord Deben, Chair of the Climate Change Committee, Lord Carnwath, Visiting Professor in Practice at the Grantham Research Institute at LSE and former UK Supreme Court Justice, and Tom Burke, co-founder of E3G.
Power to the People: getting renewable energy from source to user
This training session explores developments in the UK’s energy infrastructure with a focus on the National Grid’s pioneering efforts. Discover the current progress of the ‘Holistic Network Design’ and what the future holds beyond 2030. Dive into the critical topics of offshore transmission networks, including comprehensive reviews and route planning, alongside the newly updated suite of Energy National Policy Statements.
Learn about the essentials of obtaining a Grid Supply Point, and the pivotal roles played by UK Power Networks in enhancing our grid’s efficiency and reliability. Additionally, we’ll discuss the transformative impact of Interconnectors and Multi-purpose Interconnectors on our energy landscape. The session also covers the strategic considerations behind onshore routing and the advantages of undergrounding.
With: Michael Bedford KC, Jonathan Clay and Asitha Ranatunga.
Carbon Capture and Storage, including Nature Based Solutions
This session with Estelle Dehon KC introduces what “Carbon Capture and Storage” (CCS) and “Carbon Capture, Use and Storage” (CCUS) mean. It covers:
- how CCS and CCUS work, including various capture, transport and storage techniques;
- the different applications of CCS and CCUS, including to electricity generation, oil and gas production and direct removal of carbon from the atmosphere;
- the intersection with Nature Based Solutions, including how certificates of storage can be sold (inter)nationally.
Finally, it will touch on some of the controversies that surround CCS and CCUS.
From Old to Gold: Policies, Plans, and Challenges in Retrofitting
This crucial training session is dedicated to the UK’s approach to retrofitting and energy efficiency, particularly within heritage assets. This session unpacks national policies impacting retrofitting, delve into funding challenges, and explore how the industry is responding to these pressing issues.
Learn about the innovative approaches local planning authorities (LPAs) are integrating into their local plans to promote energy efficiency and discourage unnecessary demolition. We assess the effectiveness of both existing and emerging policies as tools for sustainable development. Special attention is given to the unique challenges faced by heritage assets, including historic dwelling houses, and the specialised strategies required to preserve these valuable structures while enhancing their energy efficiency.
This is a must-attend for professionals in the construction and heritage conservation sectors, policymakers, and anyone interested in the intersections of sustainability, policy, and historic preservation.
With Paul Shadarevian KC, Clare Parry and Emma Dring
Climate Basics #2: The International Perspective
The international climate change regime has developed since the days of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. While the annual COP gatherings are heavily reported in the media, the inner workings of this complex multilateral process are still little understood, including by legal practitioners. The discussions and decisions taking place at these conferences often set the scene for the evolving global political discourse on climate change and have ramifications for national climate action, including the development of national climate legislation, making them a must to understand for any legal practitioner in the field of climate law. This session with Jack Parker and Legal Response International takes a two-pronged approach providing an overview of the international climate change regime & the negotiations and the relevance of legal practitioners in the international climate negotiations.
Financing the Green Transition
Does the global financial architecture need fundamental reform in order to finance the green transition, as many have argued? We will look at this through an equitable lens, focusing on Africa. African nations must be at the centre of reforms and global regulations and agreements cannot legitimately be shaped absent their input.
In particular, there are calls for lower-income countries to have sufficient access to concessional finance through the World Bank’s IDA and reform of unsustainable debt, which is stopping many developing countries from investing in climate and conservation measures. We will host a panel of leading financial sector lawyers to discuss what can be done about it, including innovative lawyering where regulatory architecture hasn’t kept up with the necessary pace of change.
With Nina Pindham
Climate Change and the “Right” to Protest
Litigating Climate Change in the Civil Courts: recent developments and future battlegrounds
Looking beyond planning challenges, recent times have seen increasingly innovative efforts to enforce climate obligations via the civil courts, in the UK and abroad. Litigators, GCs and activists are intensely focused on just what the future might hold for such claims, a question the recent BIICL Report sought to provide an answer to.
Alistair Cantor and David Welsh review some of the exciting developments seen in UK and foreign civil courts to date, before looking forward to where we might see civil climate litigation move next and who might prove the victor on these battlegrounds of the future.
Human Rights Implications of Climate Change
Our panel considers climate change from a human rights perspective, and explore the wider implications of recent ECHR judgments that address critical intersections between climate change and human rights, including the ground-breaking judgment in Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz v Switzerland given on 9 April 2024.
With: Estelle Dehon KC, Harriet Townsend, Nina Pindham, Ben Du Feu and Rowan Clapp