“We’re all hiding in these concrete bastions that we call ‘Los Angeles’ and other things,” said Paul Polman, Aurora Prize Selection Committee Member, Business Leader, Climate and Equalities Campaigner, and Former CEO of Unilever, at the ‘Climate Change & Environmental Justice’ session, as panelists discussed the most pressing problems posed by the global warming and other environmental challenges and answered questions from the audience. The discussion was held on May 9, 2024, during the Human Rights and Humanitarian Forum in Los Angeles, California.

Other speakers included William Boyd, Professor of Law at UCLA Law School and Faculty Co-Director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and Kevin Jon Heller, Professor of International Law and Security at the Center for Military Studies, University of Copenhagen and Special Adviser on War Crimes to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). 

The session was moderated by Kate Mackintosh, Executive Director of UCLA Law Promise Institute Europe. She kicked things off by offering the audience a chance to reflect on why environmental crimes are more and more frequently perceived as international ones. “An international crime is essentially something which we, as a global community, have decided is so egregious that we can’t leave it to the discretion of individual states to regulate,” noted Ms. Mackintosh. “We’ve taken it out of the hands of individual states, and we’ve said, “We, all of us, think this is an international crime.” And we’re also saying that these acts, wherever they’re committed, are crimes against all of us.”