Tackling global climate change issues is a challenging job for anyone, let alone busy law students. But on March 26, the student-run Georgetown International Environmental Law Review (GIELR) teamed up with the Georgetown State-Federal Climate Resource Center and the Environmental Law Institute to present a symposium on “Adapting to Climate Change: Problems and Solutions.”

The Institute and Center “are very natural partners for this conversation,” said Kym Hunter (L’10), the 2010 editor-in-chief of GIELR. Although many people talk about mitigating climate change, fewer talk about how people will adapt to it, she said.

Keynote speaker Maria Blair, the deputy director for Climate Change Adaptation for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, talked of the interagency task force that is developing recommendations for a U.S. climate change adaptation strategy. Blair is on leave from the Rockefeller Foundation, where she has witnessed firsthand some of the effects of climate change — increased rates of dengue fever in Bangkok; slower growing crops in Kenya; and rainfall in Vietnam that now comes over days instead of weeks, causing floods that shut the city down.

“For me, that’s climate change adaptation,” Blair said, “starting to understand the questions that people are asking and trying to figure out what those answers might look like.”

Georgetown Climate Center Executive Director Vicki Arroyo (L’94), herself a former editor-in-chief of GIELR, noted that everyone is a “pioneer” with respect to adaptation issues. “Not long ago, those of us who were working on climate change were talking about adaptation in the context of projected impacts that we might see in the future,” Arroyo said. “We are now discussing, how do we adapt to the inevitable changes – including those we’re observing now?”

Georgetown Law Professors Peter Byrne, Hope Babcock and Adjunct Professor Sara Hoverter of the Harrison Institute led discussions on the legal and regulatory frameworks needed to adapt to climate change, the management of natural resources, and the human health impacts of climate change. Experts at the conference, including Lindsay Wiley of Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, predicted more refugees and extreme weather events, loss of coastal lands and respiratory and water- and food-borne illness.

A Webcast may be viewed here.