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Season’s greetings from ClientEarth A festive round-up, 2011  Image: Oli Oviyan 2011 has flown by at ClientEarth as our legal and scientific teams have continued to apply their expertise and creativity to address some of the world’s most complex challenges. We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your support and faith in our endeavour. The last 12 months have seen expansions in the scope of our activities and greater depth in our support and advice for progressive lawmakers. We opened the EU Aarhus Centre, a body dedicated to promoting environmental justice and citizens’ rights within the EU. The legal team in our newly established Warsaw office hit the ground running, launching a series of challenges to defend citizens’ rights to a healthy environment and secure energy future, as well as providing advice on protecting Poland’s remarkable and fragile biodiversity. In the UK, we fought to protect people’s health by challenging the insufficient plans for tackling air pollution: in the last week we succeeded in forcing the government to admit in court that it was breaching European law. Our biodiversity team has achieved great gains over the year, marshalling the UK’s major supermarkets into a unified coalition with high ambitions to achieve sustainable seafood sourcing, as well as offering crucial support to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Fish Fight campaign. The 760,000 signatures the campaign has received so far shows the remarkable strength of feeling among the UK public on the issue. Now we’re taking the campaign to European politicians – if you're in the UK you can write to your MEP to tell them how you feel about radical reform of the laws governing our oceans. Find the toolkit on the Fish Fight website. Our forest team remains intensively engaged in work addressing key drivers of deforestation – on the EU Timber Regulation, public procurement law, and laws compelling increased demand for bioenergy. This work is allowing us to compare different legal approaches to making our consumption patterns more sustainable. We have also begun working with African forest communities to improve forest governance and made a significant impact on debates in Durban on the content and role of social and environmental safeguards for REDD+. And the work didn’t stop there – we submitted the first ever environmental ‘friend-of-the-court’ brief by a European organisation in a US legal case, launched a comprehensive legislative model for the UK’s Green Investment Bank in the UK Parliament, challenged the Spanish government on its artificial support for its coal industry and much more. We hope you have a wonderful festive season wherever you are and look forward to your continued support in 2012. With warm wishes The ClientEarth team |
