ECo Talks: What Does Climate Change Have to do With the Courts?

About the Speaker:
Dr. John M. Doherty is a Science and Policy Analyst at the Environmental Law Institute, where he works on research projects and educational initiatives aimed at advancing science-based solutions to climate change and the various threats to humans and ecosystems that it multiplies. Recognizing that such solutions require multidisciplinary expertise, an underlying focus of his work is to build bridges between science, law, and policy. Dr. Doherty first joined ELI as a Science Fellow in 2022 to provide scientific expertise to the Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project, a first-of-its-kind effort that provides judges with authoritative, objective, and trusted education on climate science, the impacts of climate change, and the ways climate science is arising in the law. He has an interdisciplinary academic background in paleoclimatology, oceanography, marine ecology, and environmental policy. In addition to his role at ELI, Dr. Doherty is an Affiliate Researcher at Georgetown University’s Earth Commons Institute.
John holds a Ph.D. in Earth Sciences from the University of Hong Kong, an M.S. in Environmental Science from American University, and a B.A. in Political Science from American University. For his doctoral research, he investigated the behavior of ocean circulation in the North Atlantic and its relevance to the global climate system on different geological timescales.
About the Talk:
There are nearly three thousand lawsuits where climate change is a central issue, with about two-thirds of these filed in U.S. courts, and thousands more raising issues of climate impacts (like hurricanes, drought, and flooding), and climate solutions (like the transition to clean sources of energy). The claims in these cases are diverse, and include issues of constitutional, administrative, statutory, and common law. Legal scholars have observed that scientific information plays a key role in informing decisions in some of these cases, but that barriers between science and law can inhibit the application of science in this context. In this talk, I will introduce topics in climate litigation and provide an overview of research at the intersection of climate science and law. I will also introduce the Climate Judiciary Project and our work providing evidence-based information to the judiciary about the science of climate change as it is understood by the expert scientific community and relevant to current and future litigation.