Speaker details

Biography

Dr Verheyen is an environmental lawyer with many years of experience in international environmental law and policy and climate change campaigning in Europe. She has written her Ph.D. on climate change damage in international law and now has her own private law firm specialized in environmental, energy and planning law in Hamburg, Germany. Dr. Verheyen was previously a Director of the Climate Justice Programme, which she founded in 2002 with Peter Roderick. Before registering as an attorney, she was an independent consultant for (inter alia) the GTZ (today GIZ), the Federal Environment Ministry, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and Germanwatch e.V., as well as a member of the German delegation to the Climate Change Convention. She is also a board member of the Hamburg International Environmental Law Conference (HIELC), and a member of the Stakeholder Board of the University of Graz, Austria, for the Doctoral Programme on Climate Change. She publishes regularly on International and National Environmental Law topics. Her active cases include - a case brought by a Peruvian houseowner against a major energy utility (Luciano Lliuya ./. RWE AG, Oberlandesgericht Hamm, I 5 U 15/17), claiming costs for a risk reduction measure to protect his house from a major glacial outburst flood, - the German Climate Case (Backsen et. al. ./. Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Verwaltungsgericht Berlin, VG 10 K 412.18) requiring the German Government to enforce the binding national climate target for 2020, - and the People’s Climate Case (Carvalho et. al../. European Parliament and Council, General Court, T 330/18) against the EU’s inadequate climate ambition until 2030 as well as several cases against development consents and permits for coal power plants in Germany and Poland, as well as cases involving lignite mining permits and planning acts. She also advises municipalities and communities on concrete ways to adapt to climate change and to increase efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on a local scale. www.rae-guenther.de