Todd Stern Gives Talk at Yale Law School
In April 2016, nearly 200 countries came together to sign the Paris climate accord, a landmark environmental agreement that seeks to mitigate the long-term effects of climate change around the world.
On April 10, 2018, the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the Yale Law School Center on Global Legal Challenges, and the Yale Law School Rule of Law Clinic co-hosted chief Obama environmental negotiator Todd Stern for a lecture and discussion about the future of the Paris Agreement. Stern is credited with helping pull together the Paris accord as the first special envoy for climate change in the State Department from 2009 to 2016. During his lecture, titled, “The Paris Agreement was a beginning, not an end,” Stern talked about how “the trick now is to transform the Paris agreement into the Paris regime.” His lecture explored how to move this concept foward.
The lecture was a follow up to a talk he gave while in office in Spring 2014 at Yale Law School, and the course he co-taught as a visiting lecturer in law at Yale Law School in the fall of 2016. Stern is currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and distinguished fellow at the World Resources Institute. President Trump announced his intent to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord in June 2017. In introducing Mr. Stern's lecture, Harold Hongju Koh, Sterling Professor of International Law and former legal adviser of the U.S. Department of State, said, “It is rare that one man gives us the blueprint to save the planet, and then tells us how to save that blueprint in the face of adversity.”
