The Law of the Sea in the Age of Climate Change
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 15 May 2023
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Though the threat of climate change has come sharply into focus in recent decades, humans have long endeavored to shape and reshape the natural world, carving it up and making sense of it through technological innovations. In just one example, projects of reclamation have increased Singapore’s total land area by 25 percent. The Changi airport sits on land that was once ocean.
As Surabhi Ranganathan discusses in her recent article, “The Law of the Sea” for The Dial, this poses a unique challenge for international law. Surbahi writes, “The shifting relation between land and sea reflects the scale of human impact on the environment. This unstable relation forces us to confront the consequences of climate change, as the fixed certainties—soil, resources, infrastructure—that have for so long governed our imagination of land begin to fall apart.”
Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Surabhi, a Professor of International Law at the University of Cambridge, to discuss her article and what shipwrecks, fragile ports, sinking states, continental shelves, trash islands, seasteading, undersea cables, and oceanic vents can tell us about how international law must adapt to better address our uncertain climate future.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
| 0:04.0 | To access an ad-free version of the LawFair podcast, |
| 0:08.0 | become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash law fair. |
| 0:14.0 | That's patreon.com slash law fair. |
| 0:18.0 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, |
| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:29.0 | Actually, there is officially a crisis. |
| 0:37.0 | In similar ways, there is a crisis of extraction. |
| 0:39.0 | Of course, there is the carbon crisis, there is the crisis of ocean acidification, |
| 0:45.0 | oceanic pollution. |
| 0:47.0 | All of these things therefore demand that we rethink the very fundamental |
| 0:51.0 | imaginary of the ocean and begin to see it not as this static, |
| 0:55.0 | the concatenated series of extraction sites, but as this complex and interconnected ecosystem |
| 1:01.0 | that we don't really know enough about. |
| 1:05.0 | I'm Tyler McBrion, managing editor of LawFair, |
| 1:09.0 | and this is the LawFair podcast, May 15th, 2023. |
| 1:13.0 | Though the threat of climate change has come sharply into focus in recent decades, |
| 1:17.0 | humans have long endeavored to shape and reshape the natural world, |
| 1:20.0 | carving it up and making sense of it through technological and legal innovations alike, |
| 1:24.0 | and just one example, reclamation projects have increased Singapore's total land area by 25%. |
| 1:30.0 | The Chani Airport, one of the largest transportation hubs in Asia, sits on land that was once ocean. |
| 1:36.0 | As Serbia rung a nath in discusses in her recent article for the dial called the Law of the Sea, |
... |
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