About

The planetary perspective theorizes the scope of human-inflicted climate harms and promises to galvanize urgently needed political action. It struggles, however, to account for their uneven geographic distribution.

While accumulating emissions present a shared planetary risk that requires collective action, locally experienced climate harms often affect those who have not significantly contributed to atmospheric emission stocks.

Combining critical socio-legal analysis with cutting-edge theoretical debates about the planetary, the Legal Geographies of Climate Change project shows how law - through its knowledge practices, materialities, and aesthetics - links climate change to particular places and how these processes shape how responsibilities are allocated and how justice may be achieved.

3 Lines of Inquiry

  • Using archival research, this line of inquiry reveals how planetary referents entered multilateral negotiations for the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

    • How did international climate law constitute itself and the object it set out to govern?

    • And what were the implications for assigning responsibility?

  • This line of inquiry analyzes which affordances recent developments in international legal practice make for assigning responsibility for planetary climate risks and local harms.

    Drawing on field observations and interviews, it examines the recent series of climate change advisory opinions, proliferating cases of climate litigation, and novel funding mechanisms such as the International Fund for Responding to Loss & Damage.

    • What obligations do states have to protect the planetary climate system?

    • Who is to provide compensation for which climate harms?

    • And how are funds going to be allocated across affected communities and places?

  • This line of inquiry links the project’s empirical work to the multi-disciplinary field of planetary thinking, paying particular attention to questions of reparative and epistemic justice.

    • At a conceptual level, how do the planetary and the local relate to each other?

    • What is at stake when invoking the planetary: Which sensibilities does it invite? And which ones does it evacuate?

Dr Laura Mai

Laura is principal investigator of the Legal Geographies of Climate Change project.

As an interdisciplinary socio-legal researcher, Laura’s expertise cuts across international and transnational climate law and governance. She has investigated how national governments, global city networks, financial institutions, philanthropic foundations, and digital infrastructure providers have become enrolled in the global effort to address climate change. Laura has hands-on experience in applying multiple research methods, including doctrinal legal analysis, empirical research methods (archival work, interviews, focus groups, ethnographic observations), and conceptual inquiry.

Laura holds a PhD in Law from King’s College London and an LLM from the University of Cambridge. Outside of academia, Laura has worked in private legal practice in London, Brussels, and Hong Kong, and she was appointed as a consultant for the UN Climate Change Secretariat. Laura has advised climate NGOs in the UK and Germany and provided expert evidence to the British Parliament’s All Party Group on Climate Change.

Laura currently works as a postdoctoral researcher for the Constitutionalizing in the Anthropocene research group at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. She also holds a position as a Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham in the UK.

Laura’s publications are available here.