Climate Change Adaptation: Climate Contracting & Policy Interventions in South Asia

GAIL regional event, hosted by GAIL Asia Pacific

The IPCC report highlights South Asia’s particular vulnerabilities to extreme temperatures and weather patterns and we have seen this bear out through the tragic flooding in Pakistan and other environmental disasters across the region. The IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report  has noted rising temperatures increase the likelihood of the threat of heatwaves across Asia, droughts in arid and semiarid areas of West, Central and South Asia, delays and weakening of the monsoon circulation in South Asia, floods in monsoon regions in South, Southeast and East Asia, and glacier melting in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region. The Assessment Report has also emphasized the role of stronger mitigation policies and the need for education, capacity building and the closing of knowledge gaps. 

In this context, lawyers have a role to play in shaping future climate laws, engaging in the drafting of climate clauses and advancing the incorporation of climate change considerations in contracts and other non-legislative formats. 

This virtual session will examine the role of cross-border legal policy interventions in South Asia to facilitate climate change adaptation. It will focus on concrete steps that lawyers can take to upskill themselves and encompass climate change considerations within their legal practice. And it will provide law students, lawyers and legal practitioners at any stage in their careers with practical examples of how lawyers across Asia have leveraged their skills to bring climate considerations into legal contracts.

The workshop will include information about The Chancery Lane Project (TCLP), a collaborative initiative of international lawyers creating contractual clauses to enable solutions to climate change, and will provide information about for lawyers across South Asia to become involved in adapting climate clauses for use in their respective jurisdictions. 

The objectives of the session are to: 

(1) introduce climate contracting in the South Asian context; 

(2) bring South Asian legal expertise into the conversation around climate contracting including through lawyers in the region and allied regional bodies; 

(3) showcase what others in the APAC region have done to provide a template or map for processes that could be replicated in South Asia;  

(4) to facilitate the creation of a TCLP clause transpositions team in Pakistan

The virtual session will be followed by an in-person session in Lahore to facilitate the transposition of climate clauses in Pakistan, sponsored by AFMalik Law (Lahore).

  • Moderator: Dr. Ammara Farooq Malik | Founding Principal Attorney, AFMalik Law- Attorneys & International Development Consultants and Chair, GAIL Asia Pacific.  Ammara is a Pakistani corporate and impact lawyer, international social entrepreneur and international development expert with over 23 years of professional experience across various multidisciplinary sectors such as academia, law, social entrepreneurship, international development, gender and green infrastructure development.
  • Brian Tang | Executive Director, LITE Lab@HKU. Brian W Tang is executive director of LITE Lab@HKU, University of Hong Kong’s new interdisciplinary and experiential programme to foster law, innovation, technology and entrepreneurship (LITE) led by the Faculty of Law in conjunction with the Department of Computer Science.
  • Humzah Khan | Programme Manager, The Chancery Lane Project. Humzah is Programme Manager at The Chancery Lane Project, the largest global network of lawyers and business leaders using the power of climate contracting to deliver fast and fair decarbonisation.
  • Izabella Koziell | Deputy Director General, ICIMOD. Izabella Koziell has over thirty years’ experience in climate, environment and development, working with NGOs, donors, international organizations and governments, in a variety of leadership positions in policy, programme delivery and research, and across multiple geographies. In 2021, she took up the role of Deputy Director General of the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), a regional organisation working to tackle transboundary challenges of the Hindu Kush Himalayan region including climate change, water scarcity, biodiversity loss, and land and ecosystem degradation

This event will be in English.

Moderator

Dr. Ammara Farooq Malik

Founding Principal Attorney, AFMalik Law- Attorneys & International Development Consultants and Chair, GAIL Asia Pacific

Dr. Ammara Farooq Malik is a Pakistani corporate and impact lawyer, international social entrepreneur and international development expert with over 23 years of professional experience across various multidisciplinary sectors such as academia, Law, social entrepreneurship, international development, gender and green infrastructure development. She is Founder of the Seplaa Group (CEO of Seplaa Canada, Seplaa Enterprises-Pakistan, AFMalik Law, SEPLAA Foundation and Impact World Press). As Founder Principal Attorney of AFMalik Law- Attorneys & International Development Consultants, she is also the first impact lawyer of Pakistan focusing on the integration of ESG (Environment, Sustainability & Governance) clauses in companies’ legal compliance documents and has created the 5 Cog Wheels for Sustainable Business Strategy Tool for impact law, impact investing and policy integration in impact businesses for a transdisciplinary holistic approach towards development. She has presented as a legal, gender, climate change and social enterprise expert at international conferences at UNESCO (Kazakhstan), CGA New York University (USA), University of Kent (UK), International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development-ICIMOD (Nepal), Asia Pacific Adaptation Network’s Climate Change Adaptation Forum (Colombo and Manila), Hollings Centre for International Development (Maldives & Turkey) and the Asian Development Bank (Singapore).  She is a US World Learning IVLP Alumna, Former Chairperson of the Lahore High Court Bar Association Committee on ‘Climate change, Infrastructure, Gender & SE Laws’ and is presently the Co- Lead for the ICIMOD Nepal Technical Working Group for ‘Data Analysis’ for Climate change adaptation’s scientific research in the Upper Indus Basin.

Brian W Tang

Executive Director, LITE Lab@HKU

Brian W Tang is executive director of LITE Lab@HKU, University of Hong Kong’s new interdisciplinary and experiential programme to foster law, innovation, technology and entrepreneurship (LITE) led by the Faculty of Law in conjunction with the Department of Computer Science. Brian is a frequently invited international speaker on his practice and research areas of law and innovation, capital marketplaces, regtech, lawtech, AI governance, virtual assets and future skills. He and his work have recently been featured on CNBC’s Learning Curve Series and in Diana Wu’s book Future Proof: Reinventing Work In the Age of Acceleration (2019).

 

Brian is co-chair of the Fintech Association of Hong Kong’s RegTech Committee, co-founded the APAC Regtech Network, and sits on IEEE’s Global Initiative on Ethics on Autonomous and Intelligent System’s Policy Committee, the HKU Fintech Index Advisory Board and the Asia-Pacific Legal Innovation and Technology Association (ALITA)’s Steering Committee.

Brian is founder of ACMI and Young Makers & ChangeMakers, and organized Hong Kong’s first legaltech and regtech hackathons in conjunction with Global Legal Hackathon and smart legal contract challenge in conjunction with Computational Law & Blockchain Festival.  He has been invited to be a mentor for Bizkathon@HKUST 2019, MIT Entrepreneurship & Fintech Integrator 2019, Ocean Park x HKU Hackathon 2019, iDendron Incubation Programme, Hong Kong Law Society Innotech Law Hackathon and Fintech SuperCharger, and a judge for Barclays DerivHack 2019, WSJ Financial Inclusion Challenge Awards and Microsoft ImagineHack 2017. He was also an instructor for blockchain incubator Helix Accelerator.

 

Brian is an avid proponent of blended learning, being a principal instructor of Asia’s first FinTech MOOC on edX that has more than 40,000 learners in every country worldwide and contributed to HKU’s Blockchain and Fintech MOOC as well as to the Hong Kong Society of Financial Analyst’s Fintech Video Series on capital market and regtech.

Brian has spent nearly 20 years at global investment bank Credit Suisse in Hong Kong, and at law firms Sullivan & Cromwell in New York and California and Mallesons in Perth, Australia, where he advised on some of the world’s largest and first-ever financial services and technology capital markets and M&A deals, project bonds and microfinance. With responsibilities at Credit Suisse covering Asia-Pacific (ex-Australia and Japan), Brian has worked on IPOs in nearly every Asian jurisdiction, and some landmark transactions include the dual-listings of China Telecom (NYSE/HKEx), ICBC (HKEx/SSE), UC Rusal (HKEx/Euronext Paris) and Glencore (LSE/HKEx); Alibaba.com’s privatization; and led a cross-disciplinary team to establish and manage one of the first Chinese joint venture investment banks. He was formerly co-chair of Credit Suisse’s Hong Kong Charity Committee, President of its APAC Microfinance Advocates and was selected for its Global Citizen’s Program. He was also a member of the Executive Committee of the Hong Kong Corporate Counsel Association (now Association of Corporate Counsel, Hong Kong) and the New York State Bar Association Committee on Foreign Law.

 

Brian is admitted in Hong Kong, the State of New York and Supreme Court of Western Australia and the High Court of Australia.

Humzah Khan

Programme Manager, The Chancery Lane Project

Humzah is Programme Manager at The Chancery Lane Project, the largest global network of lawyers and business leaders using the power of climate contracting to deliver fast and fair decarbonisation.

Izabella Koziell

Deputy Director General, ICIMOD

Izabella Koziell has over thirty years’ experience in climate, environment and development, working with NGOs, donors, international organizations and governments, in a variety of leadership positions in policy, programme delivery and research, and across multiple geographies. In 2021, she took up the role of Deputy Director General of the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), a regional organisation working to tackle transboundary challenges of the Hindu Kush Himalayan region including climate change, water scarcity, biodiversity loss, and land and ecosystem degradation. She had previously worked with the International Water Management Institute in Sri Lanka as Program Director for the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems and prior to that she spent fifteen years within the UK Department for International Development (DFID, now FCDO) in a variety of policy and programming positions, and the International Institute for Environment and Development where she led some of the early work linking biodiversity with development, having begun her career in dryland Tanzania working with farmers and pastoralists with the Lutheran World Service.