LMH DPhil student Martje Köppen (2023, DPhil Law) has received the inaugural Early Career Researcher Award from the European Association of Climate Law for her work examining how carbon dioxide removal is treated within EU climate law.
The award recognises outstanding research by early-career scholars making an original and significant contribution to European climate law.
Martje’s prize-winning research forms part of her DPhil, which explores climate and energy law and, in particular, the role of Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) in climate action.
Her work examines an increasingly important question for climate law: what happens when the role of carbon removal within legally binding climate targets is not clearly defined?
CDR is used to balance residual greenhouse gas emissions in net zero targets - in effect, providing the ‘net’ in ‘net zero’. Martje’s research argues that ambiguity around how removals are treated under EU climate law can have wider consequences for emission reduction obligations themselves.
Her chapter concludes that the unclear legal parameters of CDR can make climate targets less precise and weaken monitoring and reporting requirements. This, she argues, risks creating a form of legally induced “mitigation deterrence” within the legal framework, where uncertainty around removals can also reduce the clarity and stringency of obligations to cut emissions.
“It feels very meaningful to me to be awarded the inaugural prize for early career researchers of the EACL, because I am deeply passionate about the rigour and craft of academic work,” Martje said.
“At the same time, I care profoundly about the substance of my DPhil: climate and energy law in general and the role of Carbon Dioxide Removal in climate action more specifically. It is not an abstract topic to me; it is one of the defining and legally disruptive challenges of our time.”
She added that recognition from the wider climate-law research community had given her further motivation as she enters the final stages of her DPhil and continues teaching students.
Martje’s research at Oxford is supported by the Faculty of Law’s Dean’s Scholarship, by a scholarship of the German government and by LMH through the Anne Kennedy Scholarship. She said this financial support, alongside the academic community she has found at LMH, had played an important part in enabling her work.
“I am very grateful for this support and the academic home LMH has provided me with,” she said.
Martje is supervised by Professor Thom Wetzer and LMH’s Professor Sanja Bogojević.
“To my mind, this award is very much a recognition of the care and support of my two supervisors, Thom and Sanja, over the past years,” she said. “They encourage me to think bigger, to reflect more critically and write more rigorously while continuously choosing and practising to stay ever curious.”
The award comes as Martje approaches the final stages of a DPhil concerned with a question likely to become increasingly significant for climate law.
