Read an open letter from the Human Rights Council to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate...

Kivalina, Alaska – On March 4, the international Commission for Environmental Cooperation awarded funding to the Climate Foundation and Re-Locate to work with the Tribal and City Councils of Kivalina to develop a shovel ready project to provide biochar sanitation to...

Three Degrees is partnering with the Re-Locate Project, an international group of partners working with Kivalina to support a culturally specific and community-led relocation process. Together with the city and tribal councils, the people of Kivalina, and...

Three Degrees is presenting a talk at Humboldt State University's Spring 2013 Sustainable Futures Speaker Series. Jen Marlow will speak on Thursday, May 2, from 5:30 to 7:00 pm in the Behavioral and Social Sciences Building room 166 (BSS 166) on the HSU campus. The...

The American Society of International Law awarded Jen Marlow a Helton Fellowship in international law and human rights. The Fellowship honors Arthur Helton—an advocate for refugees and the internally displaced who was killed in the August 2003 bombing of the UN...

Three Degrees is excited to announce a partnership with Facing Climate Change, a project of multimedia artists Benjamin Drummond and Sara Joy Steele. Facing Climate Change just released a series of four, five-minute films that tell the story of global climate change...

Sign Up for UW Spring Quarter Arctic Studies Courses Taught by Visiting Scholars  Visiting scholars in Arctic Studies, Law, Indigenous Rights, and Resource Development will teach two exciting courses in spring quarter: 1) Business in the Arctic—Working with Law and...

Yesterday, the Washington State AG's Office filed its Answer to the Amici Brief filed by seven Washington faith-based groups in Svitak et al. v. State of Wash. et al. Three Degrees represented Amici on the brief. Youth in Washington (represented by Our Children's...

The following strikes me as I sift through my thoughts on the flight home from the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development and the People’s Summit for Social and Environmental Justice in the Defense of the Commons in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 19–22, 2012....

A functioning atmosphere is perhaps the most basic element of life on Earth. Before we ever sip a drop of water or consume a bite of food, we humans take that first vital breath. Our continued alteration of the chemical composition of the atmosphere threatens our very...

In April, I attended a scenario training workshop hosted by the Global Business Network for one week in Berkeley, California. About 20 participants from backgrounds as diverse as the CIA, Royal Dutch Shell, LG, the Brazilian postal service, and UC Berkeley attended....

Jen Marlow will be attending the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, June 20–22, 2012, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Jen will be attending as a delegate of the American Society of International Law. Rio+20 will be, in the words of the UN...

Join Billy Frank Jr., Emmy-award winning Producer Michael Harris, and Journalist Kevin Ely for a special premiere of "The Iñupiat: Hanging On at the Top of the World," part of the This Is Indian Country film series.Wednesday, May 30, 7 p.m. Kane Hall, UW. Professor...

Please join Three Degrees for this Friday's premiere screening of The Island President. Part of Seattle's International Film Festival, The Island President is a film about a remarkable man, the Maldives' President, Mohammed Nasheed. At 1.5 meters above sea level, his...

Last week, I was in New York City for my brother-in-law's wedding. While I was there, I had the lucky fortune to hear President Mohammed Nasheed speak to an audience at Columbia University. President Nasheed is a climate justice hero, so despite the wedding...

In April, Three Degrees is excited to attend the Global Business Network's upcoming scenario planning training in Berkeley, California. Global Business Network has worked over many decades to mainstream and popularize scenario planning from a military tool to one...

How do we change the legal system when the legal system protects the status quo? Can we as lawyers create social change without a strong grassroots movement that insists on change, and if not, how can we best serve these movements? And when grassroots leaders, like...

The Carteret Islands in the Pacific and Alaska Native Villages in the Arctic share the very real challenge of permanent resettlement due—at least in part—to climate change. Last November, Dr. Jane McAdam, a climate change and refugee law scholar at the University of...

The Juneau World Affairs Council invited Jeni and I to speak at its 2011 summit on the Politics of Global Climate Change last month. During the opening session on Thursday, November 10, ecologist Dr. Terry Chapin and biologist Dr. Brendan Kelly of the National Science...

2011 Report Card highlights (quoted from NOAA Press Release, available here): Atmosphere: In 2011, the average annual near-surface air temperatures over much of the Arctic Ocean were approximately 2.5° F (1.5° C) greater than the 1981-2010 baseline period. Sea ice:...

The 2011 Bering Sea Superstorm battered Kivalina’s coastline on November 9, 2011, just a few weeks before attorney Matt Pawa argued Native Village of Kivalina v. Exxon Mobil[1] on a sunny morning in San Francisco on November 28. The National Weather Service sent...

Last spring, a multidisciplinary team of eight professional and graduate students enrolled in our Climate Justice Seminar co-authored a paper titled "Initial Assessment of Lead Agency Candidates to Support Alaska Native Villages Requiring Relocation to Survive Climate...

As a necessary addition to the paper completed by our Climate Justice Seminar students last spring on relocation, I highly recommend Robin Bronen's article, "Climate-Induced Community Relocations: Creating an Adaptive Governance Framework Based in Human Rights...

November has been a busy month for Three Degrees. Early in the month, Jeni and I participated in The Global Washington Conference on a panel examining the role of law in international development. The questions raised about the value of law in any development agenda...

Our mentor and admired professor, Professor Bill Rodgers, has heroically completed his most recent book. It's called Climate Change: A Reader (William H. Rodgers Jr., Michael Robinson-Dorn, Jennifer K. Barcelos & Anna T. Moritz eds., Carolina Academic Press 2011)....

This weekend, Jeni and I will attend an Advocacy Training at the David Brower Center in Berkeley. The training is hosted by the Women's Earth Alliance in partnership with the Indigenous Environmental Network. The purpose of the training is to build capacity among...

The EU just passed a non-binding resolution proposing a common EU position in anticipation of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) to be held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012. The EU's position is incredibly holistic, reflecting integrated...

Yesterday, Jeni and I guest lectured in Professor Wolcher's International Human Rights Law class at UW Law. Naturally, the topic was on the subject of climate change and human rights. In preparation for class, we asked the students to read Climate Change and Human...

Three Degrees Advisor and project collaborator Stephen Gardiner has an written an excellent post for Yale 360. In it, Steve lays out his argument for why climate change is a perfect moral storm, with the powerful convergence of global, intergenerational, and...

Three Degrees is honored to be speaking at the 2011 Global Washington Conference: Opportunities and Obstacles in Turbulent Times. Microsoft is hosting the conference at its Redmond campus on October 31 and November 1, 2011. The conference brings together diverse...

The Three Degrees Project received a Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) grant to leverage the power of scenario planning to build more healthy, prosperous, and beautiful communities in climate vulnerable places around the world. The grant supports a three-day...

Three Degrees friend, mentor, and partner Lt. Col. Shannon Beebe died in a plane crash last Sunday, August 7, 2011. Shannon was scheduled to come to Seattle in a few weeks to participate in our upcoming scenario planning workshop and to keynote a few major speaking...

Three Degrees, along with Seattle's Town Hall and the UW Bookstore, co-present "True Security in the 21st Century," a talk by Lt. Col. Shannon Beebe at Town Hall on September 11, 2011, at 7:30 p.m. Lt. Col. Shannon Beebe has spent most of his military career in...

In June, I attended the Daniel Pennock Democracy School in Bellingham, WA, the site of a newly proposed coal export terminal. (Daniel Pennock died in 1995 at 17 after being exposed to toxic sewage sludge applied to land in Berks County, PA.) Democracy Schools are a...

As lawyers working for climate justice, we created the Three Degrees Project based on the IPCC projection that global average temperatures will rise three degrees Celsius over the course of the 21st century. We've received push back that three degrees isn't an...

In April, Jeni and I traveled to Haramaya University, in the dry eastern Ethiopian highlands. Haramaya's College of Law invited us to present on the work of Three Degrees, and organized a Saturday climate justice workshop. Over 100 people attended, joining us for our...

The University of Washington is celebrating its 150th year by publishing 200 short stories about its history. The Three Degrees Project is one of UW's historical stories, featured for 2009—the year we hosted the Three Degrees Conference on the Law of Climate Change...

My parents live in Athens, Alabama. My mom took this photo of her neighborhood after tornados struck ground 1/4 mile from her house last month. Here's what my friend and mentor Bill McKibben has to say about the recent string of "isolated, unpredictable, discrete"...

Register now for a unique lunch hosted by UW Law, connecting the law school and the business school at UW over topics such as women's leadership, social entrepreneurship, and climate justice. Women's Network for a Sustainable Future's mission is to advance...

[Jeni and I just returned from Columbia Law School's Threatened Island Nations Conference, where we presented a poster on climate adaptation schemes. Here are my thoughts after attending.] Sea level projections for the year 2100 exceed a 1-meter rise. If a nation of...

Here is the latest news from Wildlife Alliance on the decision to halt the titanium mine: "In a huge reversal, Cambodian Prime Minister Sandech Hun Sen has announced that a strip mine previously approved in the heart of an elephant corridor in the Southern Cardamom...

What do Rex Tillerson (CEO, Exxon Mobil), Michael Bloomberg, James Hansen, and T. Boone Pickens have in common? They all support carbon pricing. Carbon pricing is one way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and spur clean energy development. Come learn more about...

Our recent paper, "Global Warring and the Permanent Dry: How heat threatens human security in a warmer world," recently made the SSRN top ten download list for the International Cooperation topic. The top ten list (updated daily) reflects papers submitted...

We will be traveling to U.C. Irvine later this week to give a presentation at the a3 Climate Justice Conference. We are looking forward to reuniting with many of our Three Degrees Conference panelists, and we are thrilled that the students at U.C. Irvine's brand new...

Our friend and Seattle carbon star, Alex Steffen, needs your help. He's raising support via Kickstarter to write, edit, design (with design firm Open), and publish a short book on carbon-neutral cities by this Earth Day. Support "Carbon Zero: A Short Tour of Your...

With generous support from the Tamaki Foundation, Three Degrees recently traveled to Cambodia along with film producer Michael Harris and photojournalist Kevin Ely. We worked together with local partners to produce a long-format documentary about environmental threats...

By Guest Blogger and Three Degrees Graduate Student Fellow, Jesse Burns. Jesse is currently examining the individual, team, and organizational learning challenges inherent in public-private partnerships as a part-time MPA candidate at the Evans School of Public...

By Guest Blogger and Climate Justice Seminar Student Linda Sulistiawati. Linda is a PhD Student at the University of Washington School of Law, visiting the US on a Fulbright. Back home in Indonesia, Linda is a Lecturer at the Universitas Gadjah Mada, Faculty of Law....

With generous support from the Tamaki Foundation, Jeni and I, along with producer Michael Harris and photojournalist Kevin Ely, recently traveled as an investigative team to Cambodia. Our mission was to document the impacts of a proposed titanium mine on 20,000...

Some relevant and wise words from one of our mentors (and Advisory Board Members), Gus...

Jeni and I just returned from Anchorage, Alaska, the host of the Alaska Forum on the Environment, an annual conference examining issues important to the environment and peoples of Alaska. On Monday afternoon, we attended a panel session titled “Tribal Perspectives on...

By Guest Blogger Hilary Palevsky (Oceanography) Climate Justice Seminar 2011 Student The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 4th assessment report in 2007 projected an increase in food prices as global temperatures warmed, though with considerable...

We Used to Sing: An Arctic Elegy from Phillip Djwa on Vimeo. Listen to lawyer advocate and Iñupiaq leader Victoria Hykes Steere describe the challenges of being human in a warming...

The Seattle Environmental Law Journal launched last week. Our essay, "Global Warring and the Permanent Dry: How Heat Threatens Security in a Warmer World," was one of four articles published in the journal's first edition. The essay focuses on how heat increases...

The Worldwide Universities Network has just announced that the Three Degrees Project has been awarded a total amount of $40,000 to complete its proposed workshop on scenario planning. The project, titled "Imagining a Warmer World: Using Scenario Planning to Create...

Vermont Law School selected the 10 most important law and environmental policy issues of the day. Vermont Law chose the final 1o after perusing more than 75 judicial, regulatory, and legislative actions that showcase the importance of the law in "tak[ing] action on...

The Supreme Court declined to hear review of Comer v. Murphy Oil, a public nuisance lawsuit filed by property owners seeking damages from Hurricane Katrina. The property owners alleged that the defendants intensified the damage of Hurricane Katrina by contributing...

Yesterday, we attended a talk by Dale Jamieson, Director of Environmental Studies at NYU, on the ethics of global engineering. During his talk, he paraphrased UW Philosophy Professor Stephen Gardiner, on the topic of whether geoengineering is "cheap." Professor...

A September, 2009, conference at Oxford examined the climate impacts of a global mean four degree (C) temperature rise, and compares those impacts with impacts of a two degree (C) world. The Royal Society, the oldest scientific academy in existence and home to some of...

Think big. Think smart. Make change. That's the subtitle to UW School of Law Professor Debbie Maranville's recent post on the "Best Practices for Legal Education" blog. Debbie's post drew an analogy between our work with Three Degrees and efforts to transform legal...

Last evening, Davis Wright Tremaine hosted a reception for Three Degrees at its Seattle office. We delivered a version of the Thee Degrees slideshow, "Imagining a Warmer World," and introduced our climate justice work to the Seattle legal and business communities. The...

The warmer world is likely to be a hungry world. Heat can be devastating to crops and climate change will significantly reduce crop yields. In many places, it already is. A recent newspaper headline, ripped from the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle’s business...

Dear Friends, The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) recently posted a job opportunity to work on international climate law and policy. Job announcements like this are few and far between, especially for young lawyers interested in climate justice work. The job is based...

The law school is offering a unique multidisciplinary seminar on Climate Justice this winter and spring quarters. Jeni Barcelos and Jen Marlow, Co- Executive Directors of the law school’s Three Degrees Project (www.threedegreeswarmer.org), will teach the course, along...

Last year's Town Hall talk led to Seattle adopting the goal of carbon neutrality by 2030. What will this year's event lead to? Join Worldchanging on Wednesday at Town Hall Seattle! Three Degrees is a non-profit sponsor of this exciting event. Three Degrees sponsored...

An evening reception to benefit UW School of Law's climate justice project December 2, 2010 5:30–7:00 p.m. Davis Wright Tremaine LLP John Davis Conference Center, 22nd Floor 1201 Third Avenue Seattle, WA 98101 Please join us and University of Washington School of Law...

Thanks to our friend, Marc Limon, who sent us this press release from the Maldives. Marc Limon is Counsellor of the Mission of the Government of the Maldives to the United Nations, in Geneva, Switzerland. Maldives lists environmental rights as a top priority as a...

In this hypothetical scenario, we describe in rich detail Ecuador's predicted climate future for 2040. We successfully tested the climate scenario model as a decision-making support tool at the Three Degrees Conference last year, and adapted it for use with students...

Our friends at Worldchanging just published a feature story on Attention Philanthrophy 2010. "Attention philanthropy," they write, "is a gift of notice. In a noisy world, deluged in advertising, overrun with PR flacks and crowded with the superficial, one of the...

The most recent issue of the Washington Law Review features scholarship from last year's Three Degrees Conference (Volume 85, Issue 2). The issue features writing on climate change and human rights by Three Degrees Conference scholars Randall Abate, Deepa...

Last week, Bolivian President Evo Morales presented the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon with the People's Accord —conclusions of the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of the Mother Earth, Cochabamba, Bolivia. The People's Accord calls for...

The Three Degrees Project is a brand new project on climate justice housed at the University of Washington School of Law. Three Degrees projects dovetail with key elements of the law school’s evolving environmental law program, and can help leverage new environmental...

Three Degrees has joined forces with local talent pool, Re-Vision Labs, to enter the Digital Media and Learning Competition. The competition is sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, along with other partners. Three Degrees ("3D") and Re-Vision Labs recently submitted...

China has asserted itself as a world player in the international climate arena. I just heard that Vermont Law School is starting an environmental law clinic in China, which is a fantastic idea that perhaps the UW law school can learn from. Last July, Jeni and I...

The "Copenhagen Accord." Hot off the press. A success? Hardly. But a start. The nonbinding political agreement lays out three goals: 1) A political commitment to a 2 degrees Celsius cap on planetary warming. 2) A process for countries to commit, on an individual or...

US Special Envoy for Climate Change, Todd Stern, takes the negotiating position that the US will help finance mitigation and adaptation in the developing world (we also need to finance mitigation and adaptation here at home, which seems like another story, but really...

We are busy preparing for the next COP meeting from Seattle instead of from Copenhagen. While we had originally planned in taking part in the conference, we are at home instead. We are working hard on raising money for The Three Degrees Project, a multidisciplinary...

...

A human rights working group has issued a thorough proposal for maintaining and strengthening human rights language in the draft negotiation text leading up toward Copenhagen. Martin Wagner, an EarthJustice attorney and Three Degrees Conference Panelist, is one of the...

The Maldives, and ten other climate vulnerable countries, last week adopted the Declaration of the Climate Vulnerable Forum. The Declaration voices alarm at the rapid pace of climate change, concern that climate change poses an "existential" threat to their countries...

The UN Association (UNA) of Norway asked Jeni and I to make some brief remarks on stage at the city's UN Day of Action / 350.org event.  Here's a picture of us on the Bergen city stage with the mascot for Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, UNA staff, and University of...

Watch the video. View Mary Robinson's Keynote on the Principles of Climate Ethics, filmed by TV...

The most recent public draft of the proposed Copenhagen agreement refers to "human rights" three times. Back in May, my search for "human rights" rendered zero hits. So while a celebrated improvement, the mention of "human rights" in the (unwieldy) negotiating text...

Dismissed: Native Village of Kivalina and City of Kivalina v. ExxonMobil Corporation Issue: The Native Village of Kivalina is part of northwest Alaska, comprising 1.9 miles of land that is home to approximately 400 residents. Melting sea ice and rising sea level have...

From the Age of Stupid documentary series, hear what an empty negotiating room sounds like when kids take it over and claim the space before the diplomats arrive in...

Our friend and green hero, Alex Steffen, will take the stage at Seattle's town Hall for two back-to-back talks on November 11 and 12. Alex is one of the world's most sought after green futurists. Traveling the globe constantly to share his bright green vision of a new...

Climate Justice is what Three Degrees is all about. We are very excited to report that the Global Humanitarian Forum just released a working paper titled "Key Points on Climate Justice," with a forward by Three Degrees keynote speaker and President of Realizing...

The "Resilient People + Climate Change" Conference is happening October 21–22, 2009, in Vancouver, BC. Part of the "Gaining Ground Resilient Cities" Summit (with guest speakers including Paul Hawken and Majora Carter), the Resilient People Conference will explore the...

In October, Jeni and I will be traveling to Norway to present ideas emanating from the Three Degrees Conference. The City of Bergen invited us to talk at a conference it's convening to develop the "Bergen Charter of Climate Change and Human Rights." The Charter is...

The world's institutions are not fit to handle the compounding crises facing the world's community, says an article recently published in Science called "Looming Global Scale Failures and Missing Institutions." The article holds up the example of the Montreal Protocol...

Watch Monbiot's fascinating interview of UN Climate Secretariat Yvo de Boer. The interview personalizes the tension we're seeing as negotiators prepare for Copenhagen in...

Watch the video of Stephen Gardiner and Carolyn Raffensperger's inspiring presentations on why and how we should protect the rights of future generations against climate harms. Climate Change and Intergenerational Equity and Ethics from Jennifer Marlow on...

Please join us in congratulating our friends, Climbing Poetree, for completing their month-long Hurricane Season tour at the National Black Theater in Harlem, New York City! Hopefully you were lucky enough to catch it. If not, or even if you did, watch the trailer and...

Jeni and I recently returned from a trip to Shanghai, China. We were invited to China by Mickey Glantz--of the Consortium for Capacity Building at the University of Colorado, Boulder--to participate as speakers in an international climate and society conference at...

Watch Climbing Poetree's Three Degrees performance, "Hurricane Season: The Era of Unnatural Disasters." Part One Part Two Part...

Watch Henry Shue's Keynote Address, Vulnerability and Protection: Climate and Rights. Henry Shue is a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University's Centre for International...

Click on the photos below to see images from the conference. For high-res files or usage contact benj@bendrum.com or 206 599...

Climate change odds much worse than thought. New analysis shows warming could be double previous estimates. "Without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago - and could be even worse than that."...

Alex Steffen, a climate visionary whose online magazine, Worldchanging, is based in Seattle, mentioned the Three Degrees Conference in a recent blog post titled: "Latest to Sound the Climate Alarm: Doctors, Lawyers, Generals, Bankers and Diplomats." First, Doctors:...

Without having time yet to review the 50+ page draft, a quick search for the phrase "human rights" returned zero matches. "Compensation" = two matches "Adaptation" and "technology" both resulted in more than 100 matches. "Responsibility" = five matches (three of the...

What is the role of a human rights approach to climate change? Will human rights law be useful in situating new law or acting as the "grounds" for new policy? Or, is it only useful in mobilizing hearts and minds? Read Professor Dan Bodansky's response and the reply by...

The International Science Congress just released a state of the science in preparation for upcoming climate summit in Copenhagen in December, 2009. The scientists summarized six steps for policy makers. See Step 4, though they are all important. (See full article from...

...

Today leaders met in Copenhagen in advance of the December 9 Convention. What's clear from the meeting is that mitigation is losing its place at center stage. Guardian blogger Ben Caldecott emphasized that leaders are shifting focus to a more holistic climate...

'Earth System Governance: People, Places, and the Planet' 2009 Amsterdam Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Amsterdam, 2-4 December 2009 We would like to notify you of the 2009 Amsterdam Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global...

Ice is shrinking in the Arctic faster than climate computer models have predicted, according to a recent Newsweek article. How much of the shrinking is due to carbon levels in the atmosphere and how much of the ice would have retreated anyway? UW atmospheric...

In its 2007 report, the IPCC concluded that to limit temperature increases to 2.0-2.4 degrees Celsius, global emissions must peak no later than 2015. What does a 2 degrees centigrade rise look like? The following excerpt gets at that question, but essentially the...

Why Global Warming Portends a Food Crisis Time Magazine By Bryan Walsh It can be difficult in the middle of winter — especially if you live in the frigid Northeastern U.S., as I do — to remain convinced that global warming will be such a bad thing. Beyond the fact...

POZNAN, Poland, Dec 3 (AlertNet) - "The humanitarian community is overwhelmed by rising weather-related disasters and tens of billions of dollars are needed each year to reduce the risks from global warming, aid officials at U.N. climate change talks said on...

The Climate Time Machine animates sea level rise for global coastal regions (click on "Sea Level"). The sea level map is provided courtesy of CReSIS. To view more maps please...

Post-conference, interested participants will be invited to help craft a set of legal recommendations for circulation and comment and eventual distribution at the 2009 November/December COP 15 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Denmark, where the U.S. is expected to...

Day Two of the Three Degrees conference will feature a Socratic, Fred–Friendly style debate to challenge participants' responses to a fictional disaster scenario. Fred Friendly Seminars have been featured on PBS stations for 25 years. "Focused on topics as...