ACCOUNTING FOR CARBON
Accounting can refer both to the process of qualifying, counting and measuring, but it also refers to obligations that are owed to another: to call someone to account is to require them to explain a mistake or poor performance. Accountability is thus the fact or condition of being accountable or responsible to others. This book project explores the concept of accountability in relation to the climate crisis. It critically unpacks the politics of metrics and measurement vis-à-vis forms of knowledge and accountability. In particular, it interrogates how different seemingly technical decisions about climate objectives are framed; the methodologies adopted for measuring and monitoring greenhouse gas emissions; how climate risks are conceptualised; and the implications these decisions have for which actors are held responsible for taking certain types of mitigation or adaptation actions and the possibilities holding those responsible to account. It thus seeks to reveal deeply political methodological choices embedded in accounting frameworks for monitoring and measuring greenhouse gas emission and how these shape legal frameworks for climate mitigation and regimes for imposing legal liability for climate harms. Ultimately this project poses the question: what sorts of accounting techniques are adequate for holding those most responsible for causing the climate crisis to account?
VIDEO LECTURE
Recording of Public International Law Lecture given by Dr Jula Dehm on Thursday 16th May 2024
PROJECT CONVENOR
Julia Dehm
Associate Professor, La Trobe University
Julia Dehm is an ARC DECRA Fellow and Associate Professor in the School of Law, La Trobe University Australia. Her research addresses urgent issues of international and domestic climate change and environmental law, natural resource governance and questions of human rights, economic inequality and social justice. Her books include Reconsidering REDD+: Authority, Power and Law in the Green Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law (edited with Usha Natarajan), Power, Participation and Private Regulatory Initiatives: Human Rights under Supply Chain Capitalism (edited with Daniel Brinks, Karen Engle and Kate Taylor) and Becoming a Climate Conscious Lawyer: Climate Change and the Australian Legal System (edited with Nicole Graham and Zoe Nay). She was previously a consultant to the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing assistance and a 2023 Member of the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project was supported by a fellowship at the School of Social Sciences, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton (2023).
Photo by Hannah Janssen on Unsplash