SCELG Seminar: Environmental Litigation in the Anthropocene – friend or foe to delivering the Sustainable Development Goals?

Susan Shaw, 25 October 2017, 16.00-18.00.

Video recording of Susan's lecture

Biography

Susan Shaw is the Managing Partner of Living Law, a public interest law firm established in Scotland in 2012 with the aim of supporting access to environmental justice in line with the UNECE Aarhus Convention.  She specialises in international law in the field of the environment, human rights and energy issues and is a member of the IUCN World Commission on Environmental Law.

In her career to date, she has worked in a range of legal and policy related roles at the International, EU and National Levels, including with the Scottish Government, Scottish Environment Protection Agency, in Local Government and with NGOs. She has appeared before various courts, tribunals, public inquires and international compliance mechanisms on environmental and human rights issues.

Laterally, as Project Leader for the EU Energy & Coal Project within ClientEarth’s Strategic Litigation initiative, she built a pan-European litigation project across the EU28 and Turkey from concept in conjunction with a range of civil society actors to support the de-carbonisation agenda and accelerate the shift away from coal to cleaner, greener technologies in the energy sector.  This work also involved catalyzing action on fossil fuel subsidies, which are distorting market conditions for new technologies and acting as a barrier to policy progress.

She holds an LLM in International Law from the University of Stockholm, Sweden where she wrote her master thesis on the Planetary Boundaries discourse.  This project further developed her research interests in the ways in which environmental law may be updated to fit more clearly to social-ecological contexts and in the resilience discourse.