Durwood Zaelke

In 2022 Zaelke was recognized by Washingtonian Magazine as one of the 16 most influential people for climate and environment, among Washington DC's 500 most influential people.

He is co-author of the standard English language textbook on international environmental law and policy, International Environmental Law and Policy, Foundation Press 6th ed. 2022 (co-authored with David Hunter and James Salzman), and Cut Super Climate Pollutants Now! The Ozone Treaty’s Urgent Lessons for Speeding Up Climate Action, 2021, Changemakers Books (co-authored with Alan Miller and Dr. Stephen. O. Andersen).

Zaelke co-chaired, with Nobel Laureate Mario J. Molina, the International Energy Agency (IEA) and UN Environment Program (UNEP) Cooling Emissions and Policy Synthesis Report (2020) and the underlying assessment of the report, the Assessment of Climate and Development Benefits of Efficient and Climate-Friendly Cooling (2020), authored under the guidance of a Steering Committee of leading scholars and government, think tank, and independent experts.

Zaelke also co-chaired with Nobel Laureate Mario J. Molina, and Professor V. Ramanathan at the University of California, San Diego, the Well Under 2 Degrees Celsius: Fast Action Policies to Protect People and the Planet from Extreme Climate Change report (2017), which identified scalable solutions to achieve rapid climate stability, authored by a team of 33 prominent scientists and policy experts. He contributed to the University of California's climate change textbook, Bending the Curve: Climate Change Solutions (with Professor V. Ramanathan and J. Cole), and a chapter on fluorinated gasses for ELI's Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in the United States (2019) (with N. Borgford- Parnell, & Dr. S. O. Andersen).

Zaelke and IGSD's work for the better part of a decade leading a campaign to phase down HFCs culminated on 15 October 2016 when the Parties to the Montreal Protocol agreed to adopt the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol to phase down HFCs. A global phasedown of HFCs could avoid up to 0.5 °C of warming by 2100, with the initial schedule of the Kigali Amendment capturing about 90% of this potential, and can capture the rest with an accelerated schedule, or leapfrog strategy. Considerably more warming can be avoided from fast implementation and parallel efforts to improve energy efficiency of air conditioners and other cooling equipment. The Montreal Protocol's 2018 quadrennial Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion confirmed that beyond phasing down HFCs, improving the energy efficiency of air conditioners and other cooling equipment has the potential to double the climate benefits of the Kigali Amendment in the near-term. IGSD continues work to promote the ratification and implementation of the Kigali amendment and improvements to energy efficiency equipment to achieve the full suite of climate benefits available.

At Zaelke's helm, IGSD is working to strengthen the climate mitigation potential of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer by reducing hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), a harmful short-lived climate pollutant primarily used in refrigerants, through research, building awareness and global negotiating. Zaelke and his colleagues contributed to the scientific foundation for these efforts by co-authoring several papers, including several in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2007) and (2009), the Review of European Compliance & International Environmental Law, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, among others.

Awarded for “building and communicating the scientific foundation for the 2007 acceleration of the HCFC phaseout and the 2016 Kigali Amendment Kigali and decision to phase down HFCs and increase energy efficiency.” Earned as part of the “Guus Velders’ Team,” led by Dutch scientist Dr. Guus Velders, who conducted pioneering research on the climate benefits of the Montreal Protocol, building the foundation for the Kigali Amendment, shared with John S. Daniel, David W. Fahey, Marco Gonzalez, Mack McFarland, Guus J.M. Velders, and Stephen O. Andersen.

In 2003, Zaelke left CIEL and founded the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD), dedicated to applying the lessons of good governance to improve sustainable development, at all levels of government, as well as within the private sector. For more than a decade, Zaelke has led IGSD's fast-action mitigation program, which was first described in Mario Molina, Durwood Zaelke, Veerabhadran Ramanathan, Stephen O. Andersen, & Donald Kaniaru, Reducing abrupt climate change risk using the Montreal Protocol and other regulatory actions to complement cuts in CO2 emissions (2009), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He continued his role with INECE until 2015.

In his 1993 article, Making Trade and Environmental Policies Mutually Reinforcing: Forging Competitive Sustainability, Zaelke proposed the concept of “competitive sustainability” with co-author Robert Z. Housman, defined as “mechanisms for achieving sustainable development by harmonizing domestic and international environmental standards through the use of competitive forces which reward the cleanest and most efficient economic actors.” Housman and Zaelke explained that a “mutually reinforcing mechanism of incentives and disincentives at the international level would direct trade and environmental policies to attain sustainability goals. They also proposed that countries could coordinate and provide an “upward harmonization” of domestic and international environmental standards, with resulting effects of higher environmental and social protection.”

In 1989, Zaelke co-founded the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) in Washington, DC and London, with his late wife Barbara L. Shaw, James Cameron, Philippe Sands and Wendy Dinner. CIEL is a public interest environmental law firm dedicated to strengthening and developing international and comparative environmental law, policy, and management throughout the world.

During his tenure at the DOJ, Zaelke designed the federal government's initial hazardous waste enforcement strategy. He led the investigation into several of the initial cases including the Justice-EPA investigation of hazardous waste dumping at Love Canal by Hooker Chemical Company, which was ultimately settled for $129 million, and helped pave the way for the Superfund law enacted in 1980. In 1979 Zaelke led the Department's investigation into the accident at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station.

Zaelke left the DOJ and headed north to Alaska in May 1980 to serve as the director and senior attorney for the Alaska office of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (SCLDF) (now Earthjustice). His orders from Rick Sutherland, the Executive Director of SCLDF, were to show that cases could be won in Alaska – or to shut down the office in six months.

In 1978, Zaelke joined the Department of Justice (DOJ) in what is now the Environment and Natural Resources Division. He was one of the three founding attorneys in a new section of the Justice Department—the Policy, Legislation, and Special Litigation section within the Environment Division.

On 24 December 1976, Zaelke married Barbara Lee Shaw (1943 to 2013), who co-founded CIEL and IGSD, and in 2000 founded the Maasai Girls Education Fund (MGEF) in Kenya and the U.S. which she directed until her death in 2013. Zaelke remains a member of MGEF's board of directors. Zaelke has two children and six grandchildren.

Zaelke began his legal career as the acting Editor-in-Chief of the Environmental Law Reporter at the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) after graduating law school. At ELI he also worked with Frederick R. Anderson on NEPA in the Courts: A Legal Analysis of the National Environmental Policy Act (Resources for the Future, 1973). Later that year, Zaelke joined Adams, Duque & Hazeltine in Los Angeles as an associate (1973-1974). Zaelke returned to the Environmental Law Institute in 1975 where he focused on the need for energy conservation during the OPEC oil embargo.

Zaelke was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and grew up in California. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of California, Berkeley, and received a BA from University of California, LA in 1969 and a J.D. from Duke University School of Law in 1972, where he was an editor of the Duke Law Journal. He is a member of the bar in California, the District of Columbia, and Alaska.

Durwood Zaelke (born 15 May 1947) is an American environmental litigator, professor, author, and advocate. As President and founder of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD) in Washington, D.C. and Paris, he currently focuses on fast mitigation strategies to protect the climate, including strategies to reduce short-lived climate pollutants (HFCs, black carbon, ground level ozone, methane), in the context of the need for speed to limit anthropogenic warming to 1.5 °C.