DEI Seminar - Renewable Energy and the Law of the Sea

Durham Energy Institute Online Seminar
22nd April 2020, 12.30-13.30

Dr Olivia Woolley, Durham University Law School "Renewable Energy and the Law of the Sea: Technological Challenges to Law in an Environmentally Challenged World"

We are delighted to announce the first in, what we hope will be, a series of DEI Online Seminars, commencing on 22^nd April at 12.30 via Zoom.

ABSTRACT: The talk will examine how the rapidroll-out of offshore renewable electricity generation worldwide interacts with and challenges rules governing relationships between States offshore that were laid down by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea 1982.  UNCLOS 1982, a treaty which has been ratified by 168 of the world’s States, is the main source of international law on State rights and obligations offshore.  Particular focuses are on rights to produce and transmit electricity offshore under international law, rights to apply law to these activities, and law’s role in resolving conflict between this new sector and established sea uses such as navigation, fisheries, overflight and cable laying for telecommunications.  Significant growth of offshore renewables coincides with well-founded concerns over the conditions of marine ecosystems due to longstanding overexploitation and growing pressures on their functioning from greenhouse gas growth.  These concerns in themselves create pressure for change in laws regulating human impacts on the marine ecological context within which offshore renewable energy development takes place.  Consideration will be given to how the legal challenges from offshore power generation technologies and from ecological deterioration interact.

BIOGRAPHY: Dr Woolley researches and teaches in the fields of environmental law, law and ecology, and energy law. Her research in these areas considers law's role in facilitating and securing socio-economic transition towards ecological sustainability. She also focuses in her energy research on renewable energy law, particularly law relating to the production of energy from renewable sources offshore. She joined the Durham Law School in January 2020 after seven years as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Aberdeen. She worked in legal practice as a solicitor specialising in dispute resolution in the 1990s and 2000s before undertaking a PhD in Law at University College London (received in 2012).

To view, please register on the Eventbrite Link here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/dei-seminar--tickets-102898632580