June 2008

President's Report

In mid-May, I travelled to Ottawa, Canada to attend the Air Quality and Climate Change Summit co-hosted by the Canadian Bar Association's National Environmental, Energy and Resources Law Section (NEERLS) and the American Bar Association's Section of Environment, Energy and Resources (SEER).  I had the privilege of being a keynote speaker at the Summit where I outlined the Australian response to climate change (not an easy thing to do in 30 minutes!). 

The Summit was attended by over 110 lawyers from across Canada and the US coming from private practice, in-house counsel and government departments.  With NELA's successful climate change conference in Fremantle, I was very interested to see how our colleagues across the Pacific were addressing the legal challenges associated with climate change.  It was a very interesting conference with a variety of interesting perspectives on the climate change issue being presented. 

Another objective for me in attending the Summit was to open up links between NELA and the American and Canadian Bar Associations through SEER and NEERLS respectively.  Over the last 18 months, the NELA National Executive has been developing a strategy for strengthening ties with likeminded organisations. 

While in Ottawa, I had several discussions with Executive members of both sections and there was universal interest in developing links between the CBA, ABA and NELA.  Initially, these links will be fairly simple, for example linking websites and exchanging relevant information about environmental laws and law reform between our groups.  But the intention is for the relationship to grow over time and may include things like providing articles for NEERLS or SEER publications and for

the National Environmental Law Review to publish articles from our North American counterparts. 

Developing these links builds on our existing strong relationship with the Resource Management Law Association of New Zealand - where both Executives have now agreed to sign a Memorandum of Understanding to outline our approach to reciprocal membership rights across the organisations and provide some guidelines around publishing articles in our respective journals.  The MoU will hopefully signal the beginning of a much deeper relationship with the RMLA both at the Executive level but also open up some dialogue amongst the membership.

As you know, NELA is a member of the IUCN - The World Conservation Union and the Oceania Regional office has recently secured modest funding to support the establishment of the Fiji Environmental Law Association.  The patron of FELA is Ratu Joni Madraiwiwi, a former High Court judge, former Vice-President, traditional chief and widely respected public figure in Fiji.  With the recent commencement of the Environment Management Act 2005 in Fiji, the formation of FELA is timely as this statute begins to "flex its muscles".  I have written to the convenor of FELA to express NELA's congratulations on the creation of FELA and we look forward to working with FELA members when the group really gets going.

All of these international links, while relatively small, go towards raising NELA's profile internationally.  Obviously, this benefits NELA as an organisation, but as we develop good working relationships with our overseas colleagues, I hope that our members will take advantage of these networks, either to access information about foreign environmental law or policy that you might not otherwise have access to (or be aware of) or to get in touch with environmental lawyers overseas.

Robyn Glindemann

President