Kingsland II Conference
Kingsland II Conference - The Strategic Environmental Assessment Directive: A Plan for Success?
On Friday 14 February, the Centre of European Law, King’s College London and Francis Taylor Building chambers co-hosted a conference on the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) Directive (Directive 2001/42/EC on the assessment of the effects of certain plans and programmes on the environment).
The SEA Directive is an EU Directive that is of considerable significance in relation to government plans and programmes – it requires many of them to be submitted to environmental assessment (including reasoned consideration of reasonable alternatives) at early stages of development within government, where they are likely to have significant environmental effects.
Whilst this Directive has been present in EU and UK environmental law since 2004, its legal and practical implications are only now beginning to be worked through.. This is particularly in light of the recent Supreme Court decision in R (HS2 Action Alliance Limited) v The Secretary of State for Transport and anor [2014] UKSC 3, which was the final appeal in the judicial review challenge to the Government’s planned High Speed Rail 2 (HS2) project.
Various legal aspects of the Directive were explored through a full day's programme of papers presented by eminent practitioners and academics to an audience of 100 delegates.
Papers were presented by barristers who have appeared in cases involving arguments on the SEA Directive (including the recent HS2 litigation); by academics from other jurisdictions who have had related but different experiences implementing the Directive (Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland in particular); by academics from other disciplines (Dr William Sheate, Reader in Environmental Assessment, Imperial College London); and by a representative from the European Commission, Sibylle Grohs, who gave the Commission's view on the Directive's implementation and prospects.
The level of debate and argument at the conference highlighted how many complex legal issues there are to explore and resolve in this challenging area of environmental law. One academic contributor to the conference, Dr Liz Fisher (Reader in Environmental Law, Corpus Christi College, Oxford) explained how the Directive is an example of environmental law acting as 'hot law' in that its purpose is 'to reframe interrelationships between legal actors and how they understand their responsibility for environmental protection'.
Co-chairs Dr Eloise Scotford (Lecturer in Law, The Dickson Poon School of Law) and Gregory Jones QC (FTB) will now produce an edited collection from the conference papers. The resulting book The Strategic Environmental Assessment Directive: A Plan for Success? will be published in 2014 by Hart Publishing.
The conference was kindly hosted at the offices of King & Wood Mallesons SJ Berwin in London.
See forthcoming events from The Dickson Poon School of Law.