October 22, 2009
UW law students take climate justice issues to Stanford, Europe
Two UW School of Law students have brought the issue of climate change as it relates to human rights to the forefront and recently went on the road presenting their work at Stanford Law School and in Europe.
Third-year law students Jen Marlow and Jeni Krencicki Barcelos were invited to present at Stanford Law School one day prior to the school’s conference focused on social and environmental justice, “Shaking the Foundations.” From California, Marlow and Barcelos traveled to Geneva, Switzerland to meet with the United Nations Human Rights Council and other NGO and U.N. agencies.
The two will then travel to Bergen, Norway, where they have been invited to present ideas and results from a conference they coordinated last May. Called Three Degrees: The Law of Climate Change and Human Rights, the conference was a law student-led effort to develop a legal system addressing the impacts of climate change on human rights. The City of Bergen invited Marlow and Barcelos to talk at a conference convened to develop the Bergen Charter of Climate Change and Human Rights.
“We are very excited to participate in this exciting and ambitious collaboration in Bergen,” said Marlow.
Marlow and Barcelos presented “Climate, Water, Ethics and Equity: Imagining a Three Degree World” at the First International Undergraduate Conference on Climate, Water, Weather and Society last July at East China Normal University in Shanghai, China. Information from their presentations is being incorporated into a slide show for The Climate Project (TCP), former Vice President Al Gore’s grassroots organization, as a result of the Three Degrees conference. Barcelos, a Gates Public Service Scholarship recipient, is a current TCP presenter who was trained by Gore to deliver a slide show based on his Academy Award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.
Marlow and Barcelos are currently working on drafting recommendations to present to international policy makers at the United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009 later this year.
