Changing Climate in Climate Change Investment: An International Law Perspective

The interplay between climate change and international investment law is twofold. On one side, the international community, persuaded by scientific evidence of the dangerous impact of climate change, is intensifying private low-carbon investments. On the other side, similarly to other environmental regulations, climate policies are ‘dynamic’ law-making that require flexibility to incorporate and respond to political, technological, and scientific evolutions, while investors, especially when involved in long-term and capital-intensive projects, have the opposite necessity of stability. These characters reflect the classic conflict between host countries’ need to adopt environmental regulations in the public interest and foreign investors’ rights not to be negatively impacted by them. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether climate and investment law can, through an integrated approach, answer the investors quest for stable and predictable rules governing their activities.