JASON J. CZARNEZKI

On Monday I gave a lecture on Climate Policy & U.S.-China Relations for the law and public adminstration majors at the Guangdong University of Technology in Guangzhou. Now I am in Hong Kong where I formalizing the renewal of the Vermont Law School summer internship with WWF-Hong Kong.

http://news.southcn.com/g/2012-09/11/content_54582474.htm

As the first 7 provinces and major cities who are experimenting with carbon trading, Guangdong has moved forward with its carbon trading initiative from system design to actual operation. Guangdong provincial government has recently published Implementing Plans for Guangdong Province Carbon Trading Experiment to designate 827 enterprises from 9 major industries for carbon emission control and carbon quota trading. These are the enterprises that emit 20,000 tons or more of CO2 in any year between 2011-2014 from the power sector, cement, steel, ceramics, oil refining, textile, non-ferrous metal, plastics and papermaking, but not including transportation and construction/building.

Today I’m at Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU) in Guangzhou, China, co-hosting a “Workshop on Environmental and Public Health Law, Regulations, and Remedies.” The goal of the workshop is to discuss how environmental law can better handle public health concerns, and to build institutional ties between fellow co-hosts SYSU and Uppsala University in Sweden. Topics have included information disclosure such as air quality data and toxic releases, impacts of environmental harm on food safety and drinking water, the intersection between climate change and public health and environmental justice concerns like e-waste. The day ended with a spirited discussion about the role of public participation and information disclosure in Chinese society.

http://www.vermontbiz.com/news/september/vermont-law-school-receives-15-million-grant-create-legal-ecosystem-southwest-china

Thu Sep 6 2012

Vermont Law School has received a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. State Department to support a three-year project designed to improve environmental and public health in China.

“The result will be increased citizen participation and progress on a scale that will have meaningful impact on southwest China’s burgeoning environmental issues,” said Professor Jason Czarnezki, faculty director of the U.S.-China Partnership for Environmental Law at Vermont Law.

The U.S.-China Partnership will work with Southwest Forestry University in Kunming, Yunnan Province, to create a “legal ecosystem” that includes an environmental and biodiversity law clinic to serve nongovernmental organizations, communities and underserved citizens. The school will host workshops to educate environmental leaders, lawyers and citizens on legal avenues to address environmental and public health issues.

“In addition, the law clinic, through a deepened understanding of the communities’ needs and the experience of handling cases, will improve advocacy for changes in the law in consultation with local
environmental protection agencies,” Czarnezki said. “The program also will train government officials and judges to improve enforcement and implementation of environmental laws as it will be a collaborative effort seeking to build bridges between different sectors of the Chinese environmental law community.”

The project’s goal is help legal advocates, citizen groups, NGOs and government agencies to act individually and together within Yunnan Province and to create a model for advancing environmental governance for the entire region.

Vermont’s Congressional delegation – U.S. Rep. Peter Welch, Sen. Patrick Leahy and Sen. Bernie Sanders – supported Vermont Law’s grant proposal to the State Department. “This project will empower China’s citizens to participate in and use legal avenues to address local environmental issues and to strengthen their communities,” Welch said. “Vermont Law School continues to positively and practically influence the impact of the law on the environment in China.”

Vermont Law School is a leader among U.S. law schools working on environmental governance in China, whose pollution affects air quality and public health in the United States. Since 2006, the U.S.-China Partnership has trained thousands of Chinese lawyers, government officials and educators, giving them the skills and academic infrastructure needed to solve environmental and energy challenges in China through the rule of law.

Source: VLS. 9.6.2012. Vermont Law School, a private, independent institution, has the top-ranked environmental law program and one of the top-ranked clinical training programs in the nation, according to U.S.News & World Report. VLS offers a Juris Doctor curriculum that emphasizes public service, a Master of Environmental Law and Policy degree and two post-JD degrees, the Master of Laws in Environmental Law and the LLM in American Legal Studies (for foreign-trained lawyers). The school features innovative experiential programs and is home to the Environmental Law Center and the South Royalton Legal Clinic. For more information, visit http://www.vermontlaw.edu.

I attended the morning session of the workshop on the "Future of Seafood Ecolabelling and Certification." The seafood industry and sustainable seafood NGOs clearly have an interest in making the mainstream consumer more sustainable, but due to the problems of cost and information, a challenge is making sustainability the market norm. I found this promising in that environmental private governance is extremely important (and undervalued in the academy) because sustainable seafood efforts by industry could, at best, be likened to early conservation movements where hunters/businesses were the stewards for natural resources.

The key issues facing sustainable seafood are traceability, responsible fish farming, sustainable fisheries development, and eco-labeling schemes. In her presentation, Meghan Jeans, a Vermont Law School graduate and Director of Fisheries and Aquaculture Programs at New England Aquarium, focused on the challenges of eco-certification/labeling for seafood: clarity, accuracy, transparency, measureability, proliferation of labels. consistency, impacts on water, continuous improvement, and a lack of available product.

I am also interested in learning more about the Global Seafood Sustainability Initiative (GSSI) which hopes develop benchmarking tools and provide information on overlapping standards given the proliferation of eco-labels.

For those interested, here were the participants in the panel discussions:

SESSION 1: Where Do We Want to Go? Shaping the Future of Sustainable Seafood Certification
In five years, what will the market need from sustainable seafood certification and how can certification best serve those needs? This session will focus on exploring the different incentives for parties to engage with certification. What do these parties expect to gain from an sustainable seafood certification (assurance, reduce risk, improve environmental practices, market access, better price, proof of doing good), do the motivation and expectations of differ between parties, and does that result in conflict and friction.
Moderator: Melanie Siggs, Sustainable Fisheries Partnership
Panelists:
1. Retailer perspective: Jan Kranghand, MetroGroup
2. Development Perspective: Mark Prein, GIZ
4. NGO perspective: Meghan Jeans, NEAq

SESSION 2: Delivering the Future – How Sustainable Seafood Certification Programs will Adapt to a Changing Seafood Marketplace
This session will provide the audience with an understanding of how these programs are looking at the future and how they will grow and change with a focus on the marketplace.
Moderator: Peter Hajipieris, Seafish
Panelists:
1. Global Aquaculture Alliance – Dan Lee
2. Marine Stewardship Council – Simon Edwards
3. Friend of the Sea – Paolo Bray
4. Aquaculture Stewardship Council – Bas Geerts

SESSION 3: Sorting Out the Future
Speaker: Herman Wisse, Global Sustainable Seafood Initiative (GSSI)
The GSSI is an exciting and developing concept within the global sustainable seafood movement, aiming to create a level playing field for global seafood certification programmes, through benchmarking existing sustainable seafood certification programs against internationally accepted norms for these programs.
In the formative stages of the GSSI process, Herman Wisse and GSSI have been working with stakeholders to assess the needs and perspectives on sustainable seafood certification. Herman will share some of his findings and discuss where the GSSI process is headed and the interest in the development of the GSSI process

NYT: Guangzhou, China, Moves to Lim
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/09/05/business/global/a-chinese-city-moves-to-limit-new-cars.xml?f=19

After barely making my connecting flight, I arrived in Hong Kong this afternoon, flying over its beautiful green islands, It was amazingly picturesque from the sky, if a bit more gloomy at street level. Tomorrow I will attend the International Seafood Summit, primarily to attend the workshop tomorrow morning entitled, "The Future of Sustainable Seafood Certification in the Seafood Marketplace." Topics include: Shaping the Future of Sustainable Seafood Certification; How Sustainable Seafood Certification Programs will Adapt to a Changing Seafood Marketplace; and Helping Business Navigate the Sustainable Seafood Certification Landscape. This builds on my eco-labeling research and my presentation on eco-labeling at Monterey Bay Aquarium in March 2011. I’ve become increasingly interested in the proliferation of eco-labeling, the quality and verifiability of such labels, and the legal issues arrising both from third-party certified and self-declared eco-labels. Following the workshop, I have a series of meetings with individauls from Hong Kong environmental NGOs and insutitutional attendees at the Seafood Summit.

http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/2012/08/30/center-for-food-safety-lawsuit-targets-fda-omb-on-stalled-food-safety-act/

http://chinaenvironmentalgovernance.com/2012/08/31/hong-kong-experiences-extreme-typhoon-and-worst-air-pollution-in-decades

At my workshop in Sweden, I just attended an interesting presentation by Tom Berry from University of Minnesota-Duluth about friluftsliv. In Sweden, "the concept friluftsliv refers to a tradition characterized by respect and care for the environment along with an active physical involvement with the natural world." He is testing the significance of having outdoor recreation in Swedish students’ feelings of environmental connectedness, yet finds that increased environmental connectedness is not highly correlated with environmentally friendly individual behavior. See his research here. There is an interesting comparison to be made here between Swedish friluftsliv and allemansrätten and the American conservation movement and the public trust doctrine, and what role, if any, new initiatives in childhood outdoor education programs in both countries should play.