Dr. Thomas Muinzer:

Litigation is a slightly tricky issue in the context of the Bill, even as it currently stands, and that is before we even come to the notion of perhaps stepping up carbon budgets by pegging them to interim targets or a slightly more developed 2050 target. Section 3(3)(a) to (y), which sets out a range of things to which one has regard when undertaking functions under sections (4) to (6), inclusive, is rather a melée of a very broad range of interests and considerations that might run a risk of opening a door to fairly extensive legal challenges, as parties try to stress test whether those elements have "had regard to" the legislation.

Litigation is an issue one might want to consider quite broadly and in the round.

In terms of the narrower issue of sanctions that might be imposed on a carbon budget level - perhaps a 2050 target or an interim target - in a sense, litigation sanctions are our tool to drive successful outcomes. I would, therefore, potentially encourage that they be used as a useful opportunity. That said, however, if one looks around the world and tries to point to a climate change Act that contains robust sanctions fit for that sort of purpose - enforcing targets and so on - they tend to be relatively soft-touch sanctions. If one takes a look across the water in the UK, for example, there is a debate as to whether the Act contains sanctions. It does not contain explicit sanctions but it does contain the facility for judicial review, which some people consider to amount to a sanction in its own right. One can go to court and the court can perhaps do particular things. When one has a framework that is reasonably devoid of sanctions on those major substantive points - targets and so forth - one still finds that they act as a useful regime driver. Perhaps we should not worry as much as we might think we should at first when it comes to the role and significance of sanctions.