Our Story

We are in trouble, friends. In 2007, when we met during our first week of law school, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected a three degrees Celsius rise in global average temperature this century. We founded Three Degrees as a way of asking ourselves and each other what a Three Degrees Warmer world would look like. We organized in 2009 the Three Degrees Conference on the Law of Climate Change and Human Rights, with panelists from 45 countries and 5 continents convening in Seattle over a fictitious disaster scenario set in 2050. Climbing Poetree, two multi-media artists, opened the conference by confronting the injustice of the rise of “unnatural disasters” and Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, delivered the keynote. The convening—the people and work we assembled—continues to drive and inspire our work today. Three Degrees is a climate justice organization, one arguing that climate change is a human rights issue for which the industrialized world is largely responsible. Climate justice forces us to confront the obligations and responsibilities of nations most responsible for climate change to support communities most imminently affected.

Image © Peter Essick