Impact! Carolina Law’s Environmental Center and ELP Begin a New Era 

Don Hornstein, Thomas F. Taft Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the School’s Center for Climate, Energy, Environment & Economics (CE3), teamed up in 2024-25 with Professor Maria Savasta-Kennedy, George R. Ward Professor of Law, and the student-run Environmental Law Project (ELP) to launch new initiatives focused on climate resiliency. The results have been dramatic.   

Chief among the results was a pro bono project that contributed to the successful launch of a $600 million, resilience-focused, insurance-linked catastrophe bond, the first of its kind in the world. Work on this project started in September 2024 when one dozen law-student volunteers joined Professor Hornstein on work for a client, the North Carolina Insurance Underwriting Association, the State’s $1 billion nonprofit “insurer-of-law-resort” at the coast. The NCIUA, which each year purchases both reinsurance and catastrophe bonds in preparation for worst-case weather outcomes at the North Carolina coast, wanted to leverage its $100 million “Strengthen Your –Roof” program into a new financial product – a catastrophe bond in which underwriters would both reward and share in the NCIUA’s risk-reduction efforts. Working with Professor Hornstein to research whether this had ever been done before were law students: Elijah Baetz, Zachary Ryan, Gabriella Griffonetti, Rachel Henley, Jacob Palmer, Margot Porter, Molly Wiggins, Katie Murray, Enzo Wolf, Madison Williams, and Carsen Masterton.

Ultimately, the results of the project were added to work on the financial product carried out by NCIUA staff, Guy Carpenter Securities, and Hannover Re, one of the world’s leading reinsurers. In February, Professor Hornstein joined the NCIUA team in London, Zurich, and New York to pitch the final product to investors worldwide. Initially targeted at $350 million, overwhelming enthusiasm for the bond ultimately led to $600 million in investments. This innovative new asset class was so successful that Professor Hornstein and Gina Hardy, NCIUA’s CEO, have been invited to discuss the breakthrough at the reinsurance industry’s biggest annual meeting in Monte Carlo, Monaco, in September. Professor Hornstein is also raising funds for CE3 and ELP to host a major conference in Spring 2026 at which insurers, financiers, scientists, conservationists, and land-use planners can discuss the rollout of an even broader array of ILS-linked Resilience Bonds worldwide.

Separately, Professor Savasta-Kennedy and ELP students co-hosted a major environmental justice event during Carolina’s Public Engagement Week, screening “Our Movement Starts Here,” a film about the origin of the environmental justice movement in Warren County, North Carolina. Savasta-Kennedy moderated a panel featuring Dolly Burwell, an organizer of the Warren County protests and also known as the “mother” of the environmental justice movement in the United States. This coming summer, rising 2Ls Madison Williams and Jacob Palmer will join rising 3Ls Caroline Poteat and Adam Webster on Professor Savasta-Kennedy’s research team working on the seventh edition of the leading guide to environmental law in North Carolina, the Lexis Nexis Practice Guide to North Carolina Environmental Law.

In addition to work on the resilience bond, a separate group of law students – Caelen Harshaw, Rachel Vinarcik, Jack Kelly, Madison Williams, Elizabeth Brodeur, Maggie Caudle, Andrew Frickman, and TJ Picciotti — worked with a North Carolina government agency within the Department of Public Safety on a pro bono project addressing the maintenance of coastal roads in an era of rising sea levels. Separately, four ELP members — 2Ls Maggie Caudle, Jacob Dowler, Madison Williams, and Zach Griffith — were chosen as national Sea Grant Fellows. Griffith gave an outstanding presentation to attorneys in November at Sea Grant’s annual Shape of the Coast Conference in New Bern. He, Caudle, Williams, and Dowler each co-authored articles to be published in an upcoming issue of the “Sea Grant Law and Policy Journal.” Caroline Poteat, ELP’s current vice-president, has been selected by the North Carolina Law Review to co-author a piece in the Review’s online forum about post-Helene recovery efforts in Western North Carolina. And, as has happened in years past, one dozen Carolina Law students were hired by UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences as teaching assistants in spring 2025 for Professor Hornstein’s 141-student undergraduate Environmental Law class. Only with the work of these law students in Spring 2025 – Caroline Poteat, Fatimah Bajaha, Marlo Kalb, Carolyn Calder, Zach Griffith, Rachel Henley, Adam Webster, Temple Shepherd, Darien Aassar, and Griffin Lamb — could the course continue to be the largest in-person undergraduate environmental law class in the country.

The prospects are only higher for the School’s Environmental Center and for the student-run Environmental Law Project in 2025-26.