Faure, Michael; Peeters, Marjan --- "Concluding Remarks" [2011] ELECD 270; in Faure, Michael; Peeters, Marjan (eds), "Climate Change Liability" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Climate Change Liability

Editor(s): Faure, Michael; Peeters, Marjan

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849802864

Section: Chapter 12

Section Title: Concluding Remarks

Author(s): Faure, Michael; Peeters, Marjan

Number of pages: 20

Extract:

12. Concluding remarks
Michael Faure and Marjan Peeters

1. INTRODUCTION

For some the topic of climate change liability may still seem like nice
legal `hocus pocus', useful for academics with too much imagination, but
not a tool that realistically could be used to force emitters of greenhouse
gases towards preventive measures. It is indeed not difficult to identify the
many hurdles and problems inherent to traditional liability law as a result
of which climate change would almost feature as an example of the type
of damage that could never be covered under traditional tort law. After
all, tort law is primarily meant for situations where one victim (plaintiff)
is injured by one identifiable injurer (defendant), whereby the causal link
between the known damage suffered by the known victim and the activity
of the identifiable injurer is quite clear and not debated. Damage resulting
from climate change does not of course fit into this traditional picture: the
damage suffered by one individual victim may often be very small. After
all, all citizens worldwide could suffer from the effects of climate change,
but for most the damage may be too limited to provide an incentive to
bring a lawsuit. Even so, the number of defendants is potentially huge, but
in particular the problems of causation seem insurmountable.
The goal of this book was not to stress those hurdles and come to the
conclusion that climate change liability should indeed stay within the ivory
tower of academics. The contributors to this book did ...