Law Students Address Sustainability in São Tomé

Columbia Law School’s Environmental Law Clinic helped students learn the meaning of “Global University”—a favored phrase of University President Lee Bollinger—by co-sponsoring a trip to São Tomé and Principe, a country imperiled by deforestation.
The recent discovery of oil deposits has sparked international interest in the small island country, located off the west coast of Africa.

The clinic allows Law School students to exceed academic boundaries by having them work on real cases, resulting in an institution that works along the lines of a teaching hospital.

“You could describe it as the Law School’s in-house pro bono law firm,” Sara Froiken, Law ’08, said. “It allows the students to actually do real legal work under the supervision of the professors who are the overseeing attorneys, and in exchange, our clients get free representation.”

Columbia’s Earth Institute has been working with São Tomé’s government because of recently discovered oil deposits.

“They expect that oil will be discovered off the coast and that that will have a significant impact,” said professor Edward Lloyd, who came to the Law School in 2000 to establish the Clinic. “As the Earth Institute was working with the government of São Tomé, the Minister of the Environment asked for advice on some of their environmental law. After having some discussions with them, they said deforestation is what they really wanted us to look at.”

Funding from the Earth Institute enabled students from the Clinic to participate in a week-long fact-finding mission in the remote island country in November 2007.

“It’s a poverty-driven problem,” said Froikin, who traveled to São Tomé with classmate Won Park and two members of the Earth Institute. “They are running short in part of their construction materials, and that’s going to be a problem.”

Asked how the deforestation of an island with a landmass of 1,000 kilometers could garner international interest, classmate Katherine Chiles stressed the local impact of deforestation.

“We realized it wasn’t really an industry-centered problem, but the fact that due to land reform that happened in the early nineties, the way the land was allocated, it wasn’t feasible for people to live off the land in a sustainable way,” Chiles said.

According to Chiles, the allocation of land made sustainability unfeasible, creating a deforestation problem linked to poverty. “People were cutting down trees because they needed to stay warm at night or because they don’t have enough money to feed their children, and so they have to sell the wood for coal,” Chiles said. “It’s not so much greedy companies as people whose livelihoods aren’t sustainable.”

As part of the preliminary research, the students looked at similarly situated African or island countries for best practices.

“The goal is not to present them [citizens of the country] with what we think the right plan is,” Froikin said. “The goal is to give some of our input and provide them with the information so they can actually make their own decisions.”

“What we do have is access to tremendous resources,” she said, “And we have the extra time and people power to put into it.”

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