1. What motivated your personal interest in sustainability within international arbitration?

I have always had a personal interest in sustainability. The evidence is fairly solid to suggest that global warming is the existential threat of our time. For a long time, though, I considered it only a private interest, and did not see that it impacted my work. When I saw that Lucy Greenwood had started the Campaign for Greener Arbitrations, I immediately wanted to get involved, as it then became clear to me that we cannot separate the private from the professional. Our actions during the workday count just as much as the ones we take in our free time.

2. As Co-Chair of the Campaign for Greener Arbitrations, what are your key priorities for the 2026–2027 term?

The Campaign has done a wonderful job in bringing awareness to the need to consider the environmental impact of our work and get stakeholders to sign the Green Pledge. Andrew Mackenzie (my co-chair) and I think that the next big push is to provide concrete help to those that want to make their practices more sustainable.

The Carbon Impact Calculator has recently been launched and we want to make it available and useful for everyone. You need to know not only which emissions can be cut but in fact how big an impact that will actually have.

Next we will be looking at how to help with mitigation and offsetting and generally improve the communications of the Campaign. We have a lot of useful initiatives, but don’t always get the word out to the market about them in the best possible way.

3. What do you see as the biggest environmental challenges facing arbitration today?

The need to see people face-to-face is integral to many aspects of the job and travel creates a large portion of the emissions, so solving this dilemma is the biggest challenge.

There is no silver bullet to it. We will need a combination of having hybrid hearings and meetings, finding ways to perhaps combine trips to reduce the overall miles and thinking of less environmentally burdensome travel options (direct flights rather than stopovers, night trains etc.).

There are also other, less obvious ways we can reduce the emissions from our travel. Did you know, for example, that staying in a 3* rather than 4* hotel will have quite an impact on the overall impact from your trip? I learnt this using the Carbon Impact Calculator – did not know it before!

4. Could you explain in simple terms what the CGA Carbon Impact Calculator is and what problem it is designed to solve?

As arbitration lawyers, we know that the key to a good case is evidence. When it comes to reducing our emissions, we need to have a better grasp of where they come from.

This is what the Carbon Impact Calculator does. It is a scientifically rigorous tool, designed and built by experts (led by Richard Acklam and Athanasia Arapogianni), which permits users to input various details about how their cases are run, and the Calculator will do what it says on the tin: calculate the carbon impact of that case.

5. How can the data generated by the Carbon Impact Calculator be translated into meaningful action?

Once you see what makes up the majority of the impact of your conduct in a given case, you understand the most effective way of reducing it. You can compare how big the impact is, for example, if you go fully electronic versus hearing experts remotely versus taking one less team member to a meeting. All of these will impact your work, so it is good to know which ones will have the biggest impact on your emissions.

We do not need to change everything about our jobs, but it makes sense to try to do the changes that evidence says have the biggest impact.