Webinar: Carbon Dioxide Removal & Communities

WHEN: Friday, January 24, 10am PST

WHERE: Zoom

ABOUT THIS EVENT

State legislators and regulators must find ways to adequately protect communities from Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) project impacts and ensure that communities derive direct benefits from local projects. While the Biden administration often imposed strong local engagement and community benefits requirements on federally-funded clean energy projects, we can't count on the new administration to enforce these requirements. It will now be incumbent upon state and community leaders to ensure that CDR project developers provide protections and benefits to host communities. Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs) are one of several mechanisms to advance these values.

Please join The Climate Center, California Environmental Voters and Project 2030, for the fourth installment in their six-part Carbon Dioxide Removal webinar series. This webinar will focus on different approaches to community benefits and will offer examples and guidance for negotiating real and enforceable benefits and protections for communities. As the world navigates the necessary transition away from polluting fuels toward clean energy, most climate scientists acknowledge that we must also remove climate pollution that has already been dumped into the atmosphere.

The call for CDR grows stronger as new analyses find that the global community is not on track to meet the Paris Agreement targets for limiting carbon pollution in the atmosphere and keeping global average temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius. CDR is integrated into California’s plan to meet its 2030 and 2045 climate goals — the 2022 Scoping Plan from the Air Resources Board has a target of 7 million metric tons of CDR by 2030, and 75 million metric tons of CDR by 2045. This six-part webinar series on carbon dioxide removal explores the science, strategies, and policies of CDR.

GUEST PANELISTS​

• Julian Gross

  Julian Gross is one of the nation’s principal legal experts on community benefits and equity. For over 25 years, Mr. Gross has represented nonprofits and public entities in contract negotiations, legislative and administrative drafting, and policy development aimed at advancing racial and economic equity. He has negotiated dozens of community benefits agreements (CBAs), initiating and refining a groundbreaking contractual approach to resolution of challenging urban development issues. He has taught, published, and spoken widely on the subject of land use and community benefits, with a focus on public and private negotiation strategies.

• Sara Nawaz

  Director of Research·American University’s Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy

  Sara Nawaz is the Director of Research at American University’s Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy. She is an environmental social scientist who works on the social dimensions of carbon removal. She studies how carbon removal technologies and policies might be designed in just, equitable and responsible ways, including how to involve societal groups (e.g., local groups, Indigenous communities, experts, the public) in these processes. She will describe what should happen BEFORE communities agree to benefits since these agreements happen at the end of other processes like engagement and negotiation.

• Louise Bedsworth

  Executive Director·UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment

  Louise Bedsworth is the Executive Director at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment and has spent her career working with communities on equity and environmental stewardship. She is currently working on community benefits and oversight in the carbon dioxide removal area and in the offshore wind sector. She will discuss examples of how communities have worked with other industries to plan agreements, and the governance and co-ownership models that could inform community engagement on upcoming carbon dioxide removal projects.  

• Ingrid Brostrom

  Climate, Sustainability and Jobs Program Director·UC Merced Community and Labor Center

  Ingrid Brostrom is the Climate, Sustainability and Jobs Program Director at the UC Merced Community and Labor Center. Her extensive experience in environmental law and advocacy includes work on climate justice and sustainable development. Prior to joining the Center, Ingrid spent 16 years at the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment in Kern County as a Senior Attorney and Assistant Director. She taught Environmental Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law and UC School of Law, San Francisco and was recently appointed to the Board of Environmental Safety. Brostrom’s expertise bridges environmental policy, community advocacy, and equitable implementation of emerging carbon and energy technologies. She has worked with vulnerable communities to negotiate some of the first Community Benefit Agreements in the Central Valley.