Projects

The Law and Politics of Ecocide

This project assesses current proposals to introduce ecocide as an indictable crime in the International Criminal Court in Rome and uses the findings to advise regional and national policy makers in Westminster and in the Scottish and Catalan Parliaments.

A research report testing the robustness of the current proposals will be published in Autumn 2024.
A special issue of the journal Environmental Politics titled ‘The Politics of Ecocide’ will be published in January 2025.

We helped draft Baroness Rosie Boycott’s Ecocide Bill, currently in Parliament.

We coordinated a joint response to Monica Lennon MSP’s proposal for an Ecocide law in Scotland from 5 organisations. Read reoport in the Herald here.

Working For Climate Justice

This project proposes new forms of trade union power and industrial bargaining strategies that are necessary to achieve the greening of the economy.

The project began with a major one-day conference held in October 2023 and the publication of a report for the Institute of Employment Rights Working for Climate Justice.

The findings of the report were discussed at meetings hosted by the Scottish Trades Union Congress, Yorkshire and Humberside TUC and the Public and Commercial Services Union in 2024.

This project is funded by:

Carbon Profiteers

This project looks behind the corporate veil to follow the money that is made from fossil fuel production in Britain’s largest oil and gas companies, BP and Shell.

Two reports (‘Carbon Cash Machine‘, August 2023 and ‘Beyond Divestment‘, October 2023) documented how much earnings BP and Shell shareholders have accumulated since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015 and analysed investment patterns in those companies to better understand the challenges facing fossil fuel divestment campaigns.

This project is a collaboration with:

Haiti: Environmental Disasters, Violence and Just Recovery

Over the past two decades Haiti has experienced several climate-related and environmental disasters, after which state, private, and non-governmental actors have assumed a dominant role in disaster relief and recovery. This project examines the state-capital-humanitarian nexus in determining the shape of disaster recovery, as well as its detrimental impacts on Haitian communities, especially in terms of (re)displacement and land dispossession. Its findings will be published in the forthcoming book Humanitarian Crimes: Disasters, Dispossession and Resistance

Led by Angela Sherwood, Queen Mary University

British Climate Diplomacy 1972-2021

This project will, for the first time, uncover British government efforts to lobby and influence international climate treaties over the past half century. It will access previously un-published official documents in order to make uncover the secret history of Britain’s climate diplomacy.