Little has been said on how the just transition to a decarbonized world relates to the human right, recently recognized by the United Nations General Assembly, to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. This Article explores this relationship and how to build a framework that guides current and future climate change endeavors. It argues that the human right’s substantive and procedural content must incorporate just transition claims, which would help resolve whether and how to advocate for specific climate measures. One such case is stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), a highly contested intervention where it is not clear whether it would ameliorate or aggravate climate impacts. The Article explores how to govern experimentation of this emerging technique while observing a just transition and environmental rights. If SAI is regulated and advanced within such a framework, its exploration potentially could help protect the world from the worst climate change impacts while finding more permanent mitigation and adaptation solutions.

Combating climate change requires not only rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, but also removal of significant amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. CO2 removal (CDR) comes in many different forms, but climate scientists and policymakers are focusing on the potentially important role of large-scale use of emerging ocean-based techniques, often referred to as marine CDR (mCDR). In the United States, mCDR in domestic waters is governed by a patchwork of laws and regulations. There are also major uncertainties concerning regulation of mCDR in the open ocean, where international treaty regimes have struggled to develop coherent rules. On September 30, 2024, the Environmental Law Institute hosted a panel of experts that explored the issues, challenges, and opportunities for large-scale mCDR deployment. Here, we present a transcript of that discussion, which has been edited for style, clarity, and space considerations.