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.

Asghar Leghari is Partner at Leghari & Darguar in Pakistan. An 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 presentation traced Pakistan’s journey from environmental justice to climate justice. He underlined the anchoring of this movement in the human rights paradigm, recalling that the jurisprudence upholding environmental rights in Pakistan has developed from a broad, qualitative interpretation of the constitutional right to life since the early 1990s.

Gloria Amparo Rodríguez is Professor of Law and Director of the Public Environmental Law Research Group at Universidad del Rosario, as well as a senior fellow at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law, and adjunct judge of the Constitutional Court of Colombia. In her interview broadcasted at the conference, Prof Rodríguez underlined the important role that courts have played in bringing about the recognition of rights to territory for indigenous communities, as well as rights granted to non-human beings such as the Amazon.