Human Rights Law Centre

Current Projects

Featured Work 

Phasing Out Fossil Fuels: Business and the Environment in Mozambique

Project team

  • Lea Di Salvatore

In 2015, with the adoption of the Paris Agreement, our global political leaders agreed to take any possible measure to limit global warming to 1.5C and 2C. It is now clear that to achieve such objective we must achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. There is scientific consensus that further warming will make the earth no longer habitable for humans. Also, there is scientific consensus that phasing out fossil fuels is necessary if we want to achieve this objective.

Against this background, this project looks at the legal barrier to phasing out fossil fuels. But not through the classical lens of the mitigation policies in the Global North, and focusing instead on the Global South, where newly born projects are being developed to extract resources we simply cannot afford to extract to stay within the 1.5C and 2C of warming. More precisely, it focuses on Mozambique's recently booming fossil fuel megaprojects. This project takes a transnational environmental law approach to be able to scrutinise the intertwined jurisdictions regulating this industry. Further, the project is based on the preliminary assumption that the global energy transition must be just, and it therefore encompasses ethical, development and human rights issues.
 

Human Rights Law Centre

School of Law
University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham, NG7 2RD

+44 (0)115 846 8506
hrlc@nottingham.ac.uk