International Legal Guidelines for Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal Governance under the London Convention and London Protocol

By Korey Silverman-Roati and Romany M. Webb

For the past two decades, parties to the London Convention and Protocol have negotiated rules, decisions, and amendments related to climate change. These efforts have principally focused on two sets of technologies – sub-seabed carbon dioxide storage and marine geoengineering. Initial discussions regarding marine geoengineering focused specifically on ocean fertilization but, more recently, the parties have considered an expanded array of marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) approaches, including ocean alkalinity enhancement and ocean sinking of biomass. Throughout these discussions, the parties have invoked legal principles and guidelines, like the precautionary approach, to inform their assessment of how to apply the London Convention and Protocol to these climate-related activities. Recent developments in international law, including important pronouncements by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and the International Court of Justice on the application of international law in the context of climate change, shed new light on the meaning and scope of these legal principles and guidelines. Drawing on these seminal opinions, this paper identifies legal principles and guidelines that are relevant to the regulation of climate-related activities under the London Convention and Protocol and discusses their application in the context of mCDR specifically. The paper focuses on four principles and guidelines –prevention, precaution, due diligence, and environmental impact assessments. It concludes that proper application of these principles and guidelines requires at last four actions:

1. Parties should apply the precautionary principle in a way that does not unduly delay actions to protect the environment, including climate mitigation actions.
2. Parties should apply the prevention principle at least on equal footing with the precautionary principle and, to this end, consider the potential for regulation to aid in preventing transboundary harm from climate change.
3. Parties should exercise their stringent due diligence obligations to assess whether mCDR techniques are readily available technologies to mitigate climate change and should actively pursue scientific information that will aid them in making this assessment.
4. When conducting environmental impact assessments (EIAs) to determine whether individual mCDR projects should go forward, parties should analyze the projects’ climate mitigation benefits alongside their potential environmental harms.
    

Read the report, International Legal Guidelines for Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal Governance under the London Convention and London Protocol, in Columbia Law School's Scholarship Archive.