International Investment Law and Climate Change: Competing Commitments and Potential Tensions in International Governance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To meet Paris Agreement long-term commitments to hold global warming to well below 2° C as compared to pre-industrial levels, governments must act to transition the world economy away from fossil fuels. Specifically, climate scientists warn that addressing climate change will require the vast majority of fossil fuel reserves to remain unburned, and therefore be rendered valueless, or ‘stranded’. Against this backdrop, in addition to commonly cited challenges related to collective action and political will, States are bound by a vast web of international investment treaties, which have the potential to curtail their ability to regulate in any way that might threaten foreign investors’ ability to operate profitably. \nThis presentation will examine the tension between the International Investment Agreement (IIA) system, arbitrated through Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), and the global mandate to achieve de-carbonization. Whilst the intent behind these two systems of international law are conceivably compatible, in reality ISDS presents incentives that may impede de-carbonization efforts. After a brief overview of the economic implications of de-carbonization and the IIA system, the presentation will illustrate the policy objectives and areas of conflict between the international investment system and climate policies in the light of actual ISDS cases (e.g., Vattenfall v. Germany; Rockhopper v. Italy; Lone Pine v. Canada; Westmoreland v. Canada). Last, it will draw some recommendations towards a rethinking of the IIA and ISDS system, in order to ensure that foreign investment protections do not discourage or prevent the adoption of climate policies in the public interest.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.047 | 0.027 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".