Marjan Peeters is Professor of Environmental Policy and Law at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, while being affiliated with the Maastricht Sustainability Institute, and the Research Institute of Environmental law at Wuhan University in China. Her research focuses on EU environmental and climate change law. In her presentation, she focused on the role of climate litigation in the context of EU emissions reduction legislation.

Mr. Xiang Liu is a prominent environmental lawyer and Lead of Litigation in the Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims, which has pioneered environmental tort and public interest litigation in China. In his presentation, Mr. Liu focused on the possibility of developing climate change litigation based on air pollution law. First, he reviewed some of the successful air pollution public interest litigation cases brought in China in recent years, highlighting their climate co-benefits.

Aaron Pedrosa is a public interest lawyer involved in the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice and many other local environmental rights protection movements and actions. In his presentation, Mr Pedrosa provided an overview of the Philippines’ vulnerability to climate impacts and highlighted the inadequacy of the government’s infrastructure and industrial development choices that’ll further aggravate these threats.

Alexander Zahar is Professor of International Law at Southwest University of Political Science and Law, Chongqing, China, and Honorary Professor at Macquarie Law School, Sydney, Australia. His research focuses on international climate change law and climate change law in China. Professor Zahar’s presentation challenged the use of human rights claims in climate mitigation lawsuits.

Iván Vargas-Roncancio is a Ph.D. candidate in Natural Resource Sciences at McGill University. His research involves an ethnographic study of indigenous practitioners, scientists, legal scholars, and ritual plants across territories, labs, and courts of justice in an effort to contribute to a larger paradigm shift surrounding the recognition of the rights of nature. In his presentation, Mr. Vargas-Roncancio explored the impacts of the rights of nature on the legal system and economic development in post-conflict Columbia.

Dörte Fouquet is Partner at Becker Buettner Held Law Firm. She is a recognized international expert in the areas of energy, environmental and competition law with extensive practice in the EU as she heads her firm’s Brussels team since 2011. In her presentation, Ms. Fouquet provided an overview of prominent European cases, focusing on the issue of admissibility.

Asghar Leghari is Partner at Leghari & Darguar in Pakistan. Alumni of the Duke University Law School, he has brought and given his name to the first successful climate lawsuit against a government in the global south. Mr. Leghari’s roundtable intervention focused on analyzing strategies and avenues of litigation for climate adaptation in Pakistan. He distinguished private and public litigation pathways, noticing that the private pathway faces a lot of obstacles stemming from the lack of adequate regulatory standards related to adaptation that can be applied by local courts.