Daniel Schueppert (’15) Wins International Award for Essay on Climate Change and the Law

The Centre for International Sustainable Development Law (CISDL) has announced the winners of its Legal Essay Contest 2014. Third-year Law School student Daniel Schueppert (’15) was named a silver award winner for his essay "Climate Change, the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification and Multi-Level Governance." His essay, along with those of the four other winning law students, will be published by the CISDL in a special working paper series later this year.

The essay had its genesis in a paper Schueppert wrote for Professor Fred Morrison's International Environmental Law course in the spring of 2014. After the course was over, Schueppert continued working on the paper, adapting it to the requirements of the CISDL essay competition, which asked law students from around the world, "What are the most pressing governance challenges for the world in responding to the threats and challenges of climate change...? Which innovative legal instruments and practices hold potential to help address them? How can they be implemented across diverse sectors?"

Schueppert describes his essay as an exploration of "the systemic environmental and international policy issues associated with desertification, a type of regional land degradation where drylands become increasingly arid. The essay primarily focuses on the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and its iconic multi-level organizational model, but it also critically assesses the efficacy of past, present, and future anti-desertification initiatives by the UNCCD, individual nations, and international bodies."

The CISDL is based at McGill University Faculty of Law in Montreal and operates in cooperation with law and climate centers at the Universities of Cambridge, Chile, and Nairobi. The essay award winners were announced at a recent U.N. climate conference in Lima, Peru.