Here’s a trivia question for you: What is soon to be the world’s first “carbon neutral” state?
posted by Melissa Waters
Answer: The Vatican, which has just announced a partnership with Klimafa, a Hungarian start-up company, to help restore an ancient forest by planting trees on a 37-acre tract of land along the Tisza River in Hungary. The tract will be renamed, appropriately enough, the “Vatican climate forest,” and will reportedly offset all of the Vatican’s carbon dioxide emissions for 2007. The project is part of the Vatican’s ongoing efforts to “go green”, in keeping with Pope Benedict’s admonition to the international community to “respect and encourage a ‘green culture’”.
To my mind, this is a terrific example of the positive, creative role that emerging transnational public-private partnerships of all kinds can play in finding solutions to problems as intractable as global climate change. And this is a particularly intriguing example of a transnational public-private partnership, encompassing cooperative relationships between the Vatican, the Hungarian government, and private industry. As Elisabeth Rosenthal of the New York Times points out, this is a win-win for all concerned: The Vatican gets to set an example for the international community, and gets some great press for its efforts. Hungary (whose government scientists will be consulting on the reforestation project) gets abandoned, denuded land restored as native forest. The project will be great for the local “climate” (it will provide much-needed jobs in the area), and will have a beneficial impact (if only symbolically) on the global climate, as well. And last (but certainly not least, in my mind), the Hungarian start-up “gets the Vatican’s seal of approval and free publicity for its first project.”
Of course, the carbon offset idea is still novel and the subject of fierce debate among environmental law and policy experts – a debate that I am not even remotely qualified to take up. But I am intrigued by the emergence of transnational public-private partnerships of this kind: It strikes me as an extraordinarily important phenomenon, and one that has the potential to transform the way that international law and policy is created and implemented.
Does anyone know of academic research (legal or otherwise) being done on the emergence of these sorts of transnational public/private partnerships? I’d like to learn more about it.
September 17, 2007 at 7:26 pm
Posted in: International & Comparative Law
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