Insurance claims for climate change possible

8 March 2011

It is legally possible to get countries and organisations to pay for their contribution to climate change, and much damage to the environment could be prevented were judges to make use of this possibility. This is the conclusion drawn by the lawyer Miriam Haritz in her doctoral thesis ‘An inconvenient deliberation’, which she defended on Friday 17 December 2010 at Maastricht University. She carried out her research as part of the NWO VAM (Vulnerability, Adaptation and Mitigation) programme.

According to Haritz, countries and organisations could be forced to pay damages for their contribution to global warming, for example, based on the Precautionary Principle laid down in the Rio Declaration in 1992. The Precautionary Principle sets out rules for the obligation to take preventative measures, even if the risk has not been fully scientifically proven. Haritz believes that the failure to discuss the concept ‘the polluter pays’ during international negotiations over climate policy in Cancún in December was a missed opportunity. She is of the opinion that public and private decision-makers would make a greater effort to prevent environmental damage if they knew that they could face liability for their actions.

Further information at: http://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/web/Main1/SiteWide/SiteWide3/MiriamHaritz1.htm