How does global warming and climate change relate with human rights and other legal rights? 

That is precisely what the Climate Legacy Initiative (CLI) is currently trying to answer.  The initiative seeks to connect, “clarify, and advocate” legal and human rights in the face of our impending climate crisis.

CLI was created by three learning centers: the University of Iowa's Center for Human Rights (UICHR), the UI's Center for Global and Environmental Research (UICGER), and the Vermont Law School (VLS).  Legal and environmental scholars from these schools will embark on a new and ambitious study plan to examine how to best protect human rights from the ravages of global warming.

The Climate Legacy Initiative (CLI) will have a team of leading experts under the directorship of Burns H. Weston; distinguished human rights expert, teacher, and interim director of the UICHR. 

The CLI will also include prominent professors such as Bessie Dutton Murray, professor of International Law and Policy at VLS; Jerald L. Schnoor and Jonathan C. Carlson, an environmental engineering professor and law professor at the University of Iowa, respectively.  Professor Tracy Bach will serve as an associate director and senior research fellow for CLI.

The CLI will study the rights of future generations in an already threatened ecosphere, said Professor Weston.  It will also discuss lawyers’ responsibility towards minimizing future danger. 

The study will also develop and promote legal doctrines, principles, rules, and the legal rights of our posterity.  These legislatures, tailored towards our environmental needs, will potentially be used in courts.

Weston is confident that CLI’s “law-based efforts will provide an essential basis for practical legislative, judicial, and other approaches to the threat of climate change.”

The heat is on to cool the earth.