About

Legal tools have a critical role to play in addressing global sustainability challenges. However, the power of the law to address climate change, biodiversity loss, water insecurity, and to drive sustainable transitions in the energy and food sectors has not yet been fully exploited. These are all inherently interdisciplinary issues that require innovation from multiple areas of expertise.

The Oxford Sustainable Law Programme (SLP) is a multidisciplinary research centre that addresses this gap. We develop impact-focused, robust, and evidence-based research that leverages the power of the law to tackle global sustainability challenges. Our research comprises scientifically-informed legal scholarship that evaluates corporates’ and States’ legal duties, pioneers scientific and social scientific scholarship that permits evidence-based decision-making in policy and the courts, and assesses the impacts of climate-related legal action, including on financial risk. We also host the Climate Policy Hub, which builds the evidence base and capacity to advance net zero by driving effective, rigorous and equitable regulation and policy. 

Our legal, scientific and policy research is globally recognised in their individual fields. Our research has made substantial contributions to understanding the legal status of corporate climate commitments, the health impacts of climate change and corporate greenwashing. However, the SLP is truly unique in the way our work synthesises these often-disparate areas of research to generate new understandings of how the law can inform and constrain countries’ and companies’ discretion in their climate action. Grounded in our agenda-setting research, we advise regulators, central banks, national and international courts, insurers, financial institutions and policymakers worldwide on climate law and policy. 

Founded in 2020, by Thom Wetzer, the SLP is as a joint initiative of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment and the Faculty of Law and synthesises scientific and legal expertise from across the University of Oxford and our global network of academic and practitioner partners.

• conduct world-leading and actionable research that facilitates the systemic changes needed to equitably address the world’s biggest sustainability challenges;
• deliver impact-focused education to students at Oxford and partner organisations, and to the wider legal and scientific communities through our executive education programmes;
• engage with a wide range of partners in the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors to translate research insight into practical application.

• Credible climate commitments: developing legal mechanisms to ensure that climate commitments are meaningful and generate accountability.
• Net zero law and governance: address emerging legal challenges related to the net-zero transition, including management of carbon sinks and carbon markets.
• Sustainable finance: shaping the way the financial sector responds to the risks associated with climate change, including pioneering research into emerging climate-related legal risks.
• Climate law and science: conducting scientific research that quantifies the economic, health and agricultural impacts of climate change, interdisciplinary work that examines the legal and policy meaning of developments in scientific understanding, and clarifying state and corporate mitigation targets aligned with science and the law.
• Strategic litigation: supporting the development of climate lawsuits designed to affect systemic change by quantifying losses attributable to policy delays, scoping legal opportunities to bring climate-related legal actions through international courts, and developing resources to support lawyers identify attributable climate impacts and potential defendants.