International Arbitrations Are Not Green
The Pledge for Greener Arbitrations was launched in November 2019 to assess the carbon impact of international arbitrations and to encourage arbitration practitioners to consider the environment when conducting arbitrations. The first step in this initiative is to conduct an environmental assessment. This is usually the assessment of the environmental consequences of a plan, policy, program, or project prior to the decision to move forward with the proposed action. Members of the Pledge for Greener Arbitration Steering Committee, supported by Dechert LLP, recently assessed a ‘standard’ international arbitration in order to determine its impact in terms of carbon footprint and presented the results at an arbitration conference in London. For those of you with access to GAR the write up of the event is here.
International Arbitrations are Not Green
International arbitrations have a significant carbon footprint. The so-called ‘glamour’ of an international arbitration practice involves a great deal of behaviour that is not environmentally friendly. There are conferences all over the world to attend, witnesses to interview in far flung places, vast quantities of documents to review and numerous drafts and redrafts of submissions. The Green Pledge team suspected that the results of their environmental impact assessment would not be encouraging, but they were stunned by what they found.
In undertaking the assessment, naturally, a number of assumptions had to be made but these assumptions were deliberately conservative. For example, in calculating the number of printed sheets generated in the ‘standard’ arbitration, the Green Pledge team only included an estimate of the printed pages actually submitted to the tribunal and disregarded all internal printing and the generation of drafts. The team based the ‘standard’ arbitration on a recent medium-large international arbitration they had been involved in and also considered the financial impact of the various steps in the arbitration. The team was then able to calculate the the number of trees required to offset the carbon impact of each component of the ‘standard’ arbitration. The staggering result was that a medium-sized arbitration required just under 20,000 trees to offset the carbon emissions created by that one arbitration – a number equivalent to four times the number of trees in Hyde Park or all the trees in Central Park.
The team then determined that total case load for 2018, at nine of the major institutions, amounted to 6,189 cases, would require approximately 120 million trees to offset the carbon footprint generated.
How to achieve a Greener Arbitration
There are two main ways to reduce the carbon footprint of an international arbitration. First, reducing travel by one long distance flight at each stage of every arbitration would result in a saving of over 12 million trees in one year. Second, eliminating all paper usage for filings in every arbitration would have a saving of just under 2 million trees.
The biggest impact we can have is to reduce the number of flights we take. The Green Pledge team found that 93% of emissions generate by a ‘standard’ arbitration were as a result of air travel. As arbitrators, we can ask the parties whether the witnesses really need to attend in person or whether their evidence can just as easily be taken by video. If we, as arbitrators, take the lead in suggesting this to both sides, then it will make it much easier for parties to agree to minimise travel in this regard. Similarly, it should be the norm for any follow up deliberations (after the initial face to face deliberations) to be conducted through video link using screen sharing technology to discuss evidence
