Research Initiatives
Research Overview
CLEE’s research goals are two-fold. First, CLEE strives to be a foremost resource for environmental policy and legal recommendations by sharing its expertise. Second, reflecting the center’s multidisciplinary approach, CLEE regularly organizes meetings, roundtables, workshops, and conferences. This convening function helps ensure the center is producing multi-faceted research and policy recommendations that take into account the full complexity of the environmental challenges the center aims to confront. For example, CLEE recently held roundtables, organized in cooperation with the Berkeley Institute of the Environment, which brought together climate scientists and lawyers.
Climate Change
A key CLEE climate change initiative involves research to assess and identify measures California government officials can adopt to enforce greenhouse gas emission reduction commitments outside California, and to study legal concerns associated with linking a California emissions market to international emissions markets.
At the regional level, CLEE is providing legal expertise and policy advice concerning how public lands, and the myriad ecological resources associated with them, might best be managed in an era of climate change. While this project’s principal focus is on conservation lands in California, this policy initiative also has direct relevance to such lands throughout the American West. CLEE hosted a symposium on this important subject, in co-sponsorship with California state government and the non-profit community.
The center also held a major two-day conference, “Cap and Trade as a Tool of Climate Change Policy: An International Conference for Law, Business and Policy Practitioners.” This was an important forum on these issues, with internationally recognized scholars and policymakers in attendance.
Water
Effective domestic and international law are critically important to meeting the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal of reducing by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water, particularly in light of the effects of climate change. Berkeley Law faculty and students are investigating these and other approaches to meet the crisis in water supply that is affecting California and the world. CLEE is central to these efforts. More research is needed to identify legal constraints, environmental governance structures and potential regulatory reforms that will improve water management in arid regions. CLEE’s interdisciplinary water governance research program addresses the statutory, Islamic and customary law governing ownership, use and pollution of surface water resources and groundwater.
Energy
CLEE is at the forefront of energy research and policy development. One such center initiative is examining the current regulatory regimes affecting bioenergy development in the United States; existing legal principles that may constrain expanded production of biofuels; and potential reforms that could foster development of biofuels without sacrificing environmental quality or social equity. Additional research goals include monitoring California’s energy policy prospectively—as the state strives to maintain its national and international leadership role in sustainable energy policy—and examining the role nuclear power should play in the ongoing effort to mitigate climate change.