UK Government review adopts recommendations of Edinburgh/Oxford legal research team

The UK Government’s "Independent Review of Net Zero" (a.k.a. the  ‘Skidmore Review’) adopts the recommendations and findings from a joint Edinburgh/Oxford legal research team investigating the legal framing of greenhouse gas removals. The project, CO2RE, is a £6m UKRI/NERC funded project, the hub for the larger interdisciplinary £31.5 million Strategic Priority Fund Wave 2 Greenhouse Gas Removal Demonstrators programme. Dr Navraj Singh Ghaleigh, Senior Lecturer in Climate Law at Edinburgh Law School, is the project’s legal lead.

The 'Skidmore Review' published its report, on 13 January 2023 following 50 roundtables with key stakeholders, and 1,800 responses to the call for evidence. Based on research from the CO2RE project, Ghaleigh led the team’s evidence submitted to the inquiry. The submission was cited approvingly in the report, specifically in sections 2.7.4 "Developing engineered Greenhouse Gas Removals" and 2.7.7 "Develop business models for engineered GGRs," both feeding into the conclusion and recommendations (see pg. 288).

These findings also draw upon Ghaleigh and Macinante’s co-authored paper on liability regimes for carbon dioxide removals and associated market mechanisms. It argues against a recent UK government report, which supports allocating liability for storage failure with off setters. Instead the paper proposes an institutional structure to set liability for on-going storage integrity with the party that carries out the CDR project.