confronting the climate emergency and environmental challenges.
Ecological emergencies, including climate change and biodiversity loss, are among the defining challenges of our era. At the Center, we tackle these threats head-on, developing and applying approaches that take seriously the unprecedented nature of these issues.
Given the complexity of these challenges, we incorporate insights and practices from across a range of disciplines to advance the academic research, professional training, and capacity-building needed to cohere and accelerate the field of legal practice dedicated to these enormous challenges. Our work, moreover, is oriented towards the past, present, and future: we work to secure reparations and redress for environmental harms while also promoting environmental justice for present and future generations.
In particular, our legal advocacy and strategic litigation seeks to accelerate action on environmental emergencies in the limited time remaining to avert the most catastrophic scenarios of degradation. This means holding extractive industries and corporations accountable for their contributions to these environmental emergencies as well as other human rights abuses. We also emphasize collaborative action with those on the frontlines of impacts and environmental defense. This includes extensive work with Indigenous communities to safeguard their rights and the integrity of their territories, which is essential to securing global justice as well as a livable planet.
training the next generation of human rights advocates.
Through our dedicated legal clinics, we work closely with a range of partners from the Global South and North, including research centers, scientists, human rights and environmental NGOs, Indigenous communities, rural communities, and social movements.
The Earth Rights Research & Action
The Earth Rights Research & Action (TERRA NYU Law) Clinic trains law students for careers at the intersection of human rights and environmental justice, providing them with an opportunity to work closely with partners on legal actions and litigation designed to tackle ongoing ecological emergencies.
The Global Justice Clinic partners with movements, activists, and community organizations to advance economic, racial, climate, and migration injustice, while training students in solidarity-based models for human rights and social justice lawyering.
the earth rights research & action projects
Project
Climate Law Accelerator (CLX)
CLX is a global collaborative hub that seeks to catalyze the legal strategies, tools, and ideas needed to secure urgent and ambitious climate action.
Project
More Than Human Rights Life (MOTH) Program
The MOTH Program is an interdisciplinary initiative dedicated to advancing the rights and well-being of humans, non-humans, and the web of life that sustains us all.
Project
Right to a Healthy Environment (R2HE)
In collaboration with partners like the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), this initiative documents and analyzes trends and developments in the implementation of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.
global justice clinic projects
Project
Climate Justice and Reparations
GJC works with advocates and social movements to support and advance the intertwined struggles for climate justice and reparations for Haiti and beyond.
Project
Mining Justice and Self-Determination
GJC supports Haitian communities to know their rights in relation to extractive industry activity, to hold corporate actors to account, and to promote rural self- determination in areas affected by mining. GJC monitors mining on the Haiti-DR border and connects extractivism to climate justice and reparations.
Project
Indigenous Land Rights and Earth Defense
GJC collaborates with indigenous communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis and extractive sector activity to assert their territorial rights and self-determination, through legal, advocacy, and legal empowerment support.
