About The Center for International Environmental Law Programs

Since 1989, the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) has worked to strengthen and use international law and institutions to protect the environment, promote human health, and ensure a just and sustainable society. Our program areas include:

• Biodiversity

CIEL's Biodiversity and Wildlife Program promotes the development and enforcement of an international framework of law and policy that supports conservation and sustainable use of living resources, including biodiversity, wildlife, forests and fisheries.


• Chemicals

CIEL works in the United States and internationally to eliminate threats posed by dangerous chemicals. CIEL's Chemicals Program is actively engaged in preventing the rollback of environmental protections, in developing new legal frameworks, and in winning broader public participation in international negotiations over the future of chemicals management. These activities include the CIEL Nanotechnologies Project.

• Climate Change

CIEL's Climate Change Program focuses on impacts to people and ecosystems of the Arctic and Subarctic. The Program works to protect the Earth's climate system through promotion of human rights, forest conservation, and biodiversity protection. CIEL advises key participants in the international policy arena on how to work towards a sustainable, enforceable emissions reduction framework.

• Human Rights and the Environment
  

Working in partnership with human rights and environment advocates around the world, CIEL integrates the concerns of environmental justice and human rights into law and policy. CIEL addresses specific threats to citizens and local communities, as well as broader structural threats to environmental justice and sustainable development.

• International Financial Institutions

CIEL provides leadership experience in reforming International Financial Institutions, as well as on issues of Intellectual Property and ensures that sustainable development and poverty-alleviating concerns are included in on-going processes. CIEL's Trade and Sustainable Development Program works to reform international trade rules, institutions, and policies to promote sustainable trade and investment.



• Law and Communities

CIEL's Law and Communities program focuses on rural constituencies in the majority world, and on issues related to community-based property rights. The program explores the impacts of national and international laws, and the private sector and markets, on local incentives and disincentives for sustainable community-based natural resource management (CBNRM).



• Trade & Sustainable Development

CIEL's Trade & Sustainable Development Program seeks to reform the global framework of economic law, policy and institutions in order to create a more balanced global economy that is environmentally sustainable and beneficial to all people in a more equitable way.