The Working Group KlimaSchutzRecht (AG KSR) is a joint thematic working group founded in 2016 on the initiative of Gottfried Kirchengast and Eva Schulev-Steindl, bringing together the climate research network CCCA and the Commission on Climate and Air Quality of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW-KKL), where it carries out activities within the KKL Scientific Joint Focus (JF) "Climate and Law". The working group members from academia and practice are experts with backgrounds in climate and the environment, drawn from the judiciary, public administration, politics, business and diplomacy, as well as from various disciplines across the legal, natural, social and humanities sciences, who share a common commitment to interdisciplinary dialogue aimed at stimulating and promoting research, knowledge transfer and public outreach in the field of "climate change and law".
A overarching research question of the AG KSR — which aims to contribute to answering this question in a variety of ways — is: "How can the legislature and the judiciary in Austria and the EU better fulfil their essentially necessary contribution to domestic and international climate protection measures and to climate change adaptation in the future, through appropriate legislation and jurisprudence?"
The working group members see significant potential in more strongly integrating, networking and thereby also reinforcing, improving the quality of, and raising the visibility of climate-related legal research within the climate research community in Austria — both as a means of strengthening the breadth, depth and interdisciplinarity of climate research in general, and as an active contribution to a just transition to climate neutrality in particular.
Leaders:
- Miriam Hofer (Institute of Public Law and Political Science, University of Graz)
- Oliver C. Ruppel (Research Centre for Climate Protection Law, University of Graz)
- Daniel Ennöckl (Institute of Legal Sciences, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna)
- Gottfried Kirchengast (Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change, University of Graz)
Founding leadership:
- Eva Schulev-Steindl (University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna)
Contact: climlaw@uni-graz.at