Course Recording:
Course description:
This class focuses on the marine environment, marine litter and human rights and explore issues around government and business responsibility and accountability, as well knowledge gaps and the blind spots we face when it comes to impacts of plastic products (and their additives) and plastic pollution on women, informal workers, disadvantaged groups.
Recommended Readings:
Neglected: Environmental justice impacts of marine litter and plastic pollution: https://wedocs.unep.org/xmlui/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/35417/EJIPP.pdf
Marine plastic litter in East Asian Seas: Gender, human rights and economic dimensions.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document.html?reference=EXPO_STU(2020)603491
Morgera, Elisa and Nakamura, Julia, Shedding a Light on the Human Rights of Small-scale Fishers: Complementarities and Contrasts between the UN Declaration on Peasants’ Rights and the Small-Scale Fisheries Guidelines (May 20, 2021). in Brunori et al (eds), Commentary on the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (Routledge, forth 2021), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3850133 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3850133
Morgera, Elisa, The relevance of the human right to science for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction: a new legally binding instrument to support co-production of ocean knowledge across scales – http://ssrn.com/abstract=3870399
Instructors:
Natalie Harms coordinates the marine litter work of the Secretariat of the Coordinating Body on the Seas of East Asia (COBSEA), a regional intergovernmental mechanism for the protection of the marine and coastal environment of the East Asian Seas and one of 18 Regional Seas programmes. The COBSEA Secretariat is hosted by Thailand and administered by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in Bangkok, Thailand. Natalie has hands-on experience working with local and national governments, informal waste workers, businesses and coastal communities, to prevent and reduce plastic pollution and protect marine and coastal ecosystems in the East Asian Seas region. Her areas of expertise include ocean governance, marine litter planning and monitoring, ecosystem-based solutions in islands, environmental rights and gender mainstreaming. She is passionate about tackling plastic pollution, climate action, equality, and regional cooperation for a healthy ocean and healthy communities.
Prof Elisa Morgera (University of Strathclyde, Glasgow) specializes in international biodiversity law and its linkages with human rights, notably the rights of indigenous peoples and small-scale fishing communities, everyone’s right to health and science, and business responsibility to respect human rights. She is the director of the One Ocean Hub, a global inter-disciplinary research collaboration of research institutions in the UK, Africa, South Pacific and the Caribbean, as well as UN agencies and other international partners. The One Ocean Hub is pioneering research on human rights and the marine environment with a view to better connecting marine and social sciences, and the arts, to support fair and inclusive decision-making for a healthy ocean whereby people and planet flourish.
