Friday 27 November 2026 4:00pm to 5:00pm
David Attenborough Building
About
Speaker: Dr Rupert Stuart-Smith (Deputy Director and Senior Research Fellow in Climate Science and the Law at the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme, University of Oxford)
Two decades of attribution research have shed light on the impacts of climate change occurring worldwide. The first wave of attribution research quantified climate change impacts on the intensity and probability of extreme weather events and slow-onset changes in glaciers and sea levels. Over the past decade, impact attribution studies have extended these methods to assess the attributable impacts of extreme events on agriculture, health, economic losses and biodiversity. Concurrently, source attribution research quantified individual emitters’ contributions to climate change impacts.
Steady progress towards being able to quantify individual emitters’ contributions to specific losses has brought us closer to true ‘end-to-end’ attribution. This lecture will explore how these scientific developments have paved the way for better-evidenced legal claims on climate change impacts, and whether the science available today might meet legal standards for causation.
The Cambridge Seminar Series on Law and the Climate Crisis explores the vital role of legal systems in tackling one of the most pressing issues of our time.
This series brings together top experts in law and climate action to discuss how climate change interacts with specific areas of law, setting out both how legal fields are being impacted by climate change and how the law can help drive climate action.
The Cambridge Seminar Series on Law and the Climate Crisis is co-hosted by the Centre for Climate Engagement at Hughes Hall, Cambridge Zero, the Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (CEENRG), the Cambridge Climate Society, the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, and the Net Zero Lawyers Alliance.
For more information and to register see the Centre for Climate Engagement website.