Environmental Trading Programs Subject of Hirsch’s Latest Scholarship

January 18, 2008

Environmental law expert, Professor Dennis Hirsch has recently engaged in writing and speaking about emissions trading and environmental law. His newly released co-authored book chapter, Environmental Trading Programs, surveys the major existing environmental trading programs and explains how they work.  It appears in a leading environmental law treatise designed for practitioners, Environmental Law Practice Guide: State and Federal Law (M. Gerrard, ed.) (Matthew Bender, 2008).

He also has had a full-length article published by Florida State University College of Law, Trading in Ecosystem Services: Carbon Sinks and the Clean Development Mechanism. The article appears in volume 22 of the Journal of Land Use & Environmental Law.

In this piece, Hirsch develops a new theoretical framework for thinking about trading in “ecosystem services” – the services that nature provides to human societies.  It focuses on the role that forests play in absorbing and “fixing” carbon and so in stabilizing the climate.  It examines the Clean Development Mechanism, an international trading program under which those who expand forests in third world countries can generate and sell carbon reduction credits.  Drawing on this example, Hirsch sets out the advantages and risks of ecosystem-based trading systems and develops a framework for determining when this type of program is likely to work best.

Hirsch’s other latest work published by the Georgia Law Review — Protecting the Inner Environment: What Privacy Regulation Can Learn from Environmental Law — was recently listed on SSRN's Top Ten download list for eBusiness & eCommerce.

In 2007, Hirsch co-authored a chapter in Global Climate Change and U.S. Law (M. Gerrard, ed., 2007), a volume published by the American Bar Association. The chapter, "Emissions Trading – Practical Aspects", was written by Hirsch, Michael Heintz and Andrew Bergman.

A noted speaker on environmental law issues, Hirsch has made recent presentations at the Columbus Bar Association event on Global Climate Change: How Industry and Government are Reacting to this Inconvenient Truth; at the Georgetown University Law Center, Environmental Law Research Workshop on The Greening of Industry and the Evolution of Environmental Law; and at the University of Chicago Gleacher Center’s Carbon Finance World 2007 conference.