Blockchain and Climate Finance law: A Perpetual Synergy or a One-way Street?

Description

Climate change is a critical and imminent global challenge necessitating urgent mitigation and adaptation actions, which require financial flows. The International Energy Agency estimates the cost of global transition at $90 trillion by 2030. An emerging area of law, termed ‘climate finance law’, predominantly examines the role of law in mobilising and leveraging (i.e. generating) the needed finance. It does, however, not yet focus on the two further phases of channelling and spending of climate finance that are crucial for effective approaches to climate finance. Blockchain technology is a tool that can support these three phases of climate finance, but its fit with climate finance law is not yet explored. Blockchains are a distributed ledger on which data can be permanently stored so that it is open, verifiable, and cannot be modified. This paper assesses the role of blockchain applications to climate finance in supporting climate finance law, as well as the converse: the role of climate finance law in supporting blockchain technology for climate finance. In doing so, this paper sets out the benefits and limits of blockchain in context of climate finance law, and concludes that there can be a useful synergistic relationship between the two. The wider contribution of this paper is therefore the investigation of one recent innovative technology, and its potential impact on and implications for the law.

Period	16 May 2019
Event title	TILTing Perspectives 2019: Regulating a world in transition
Event type	Conference
Location	Tilburg, Netherlands