For Green, who was the winner of the 2010 Lawyers Weekly Young Gun Icon Award, it was a semester spent at Georgetown University which instilled in him a passion for the environment while studying Climate Science and Policy.

Green became curious about climate change issues and how solutions to global climate problems could be developed through policy and law. When he started at Allens in 2007, he soon landed a place in the firm's energy and resources group.

Since then, Green has been heavily involved in both local and international climate change issues and has made a name for himself in environmental circles through his regular blogs and editorial pieces, contributions to various mainstream media outlets (as well as the Lowy Institute) and his participation in the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference.

Green attended the conference as policy advisor to an NGO named Project Survival Pacific, helping youth of Pacific Island nations participate in climate change negotiations - an experience which has been a career highlight thus far.

"It was important that young people from the Pacific Islands were able to attend the conference, share their stories and build networks with other NGOs and advocacy groups, seeing as they are on the frontline of climate change," he says.

Green says the Copenhagen experience helped him clarify his career aspirations.

"It gave me an insight into how things work - or don't work - on the ground in international negotiations. I thought it was really important to actually attend a negotiation and understand what it is like in practice," he says.

"I am really interested in these issues and I want to keep working with these issues."

For the moment, Green is content at Allens, where he is expanding his knowledge base and continuing with his external advocacy and publications.

"Longer term, I am really interested in the interlinked challenges, not just about climate change, but about energy, food, land use and water, and [how they] relate to … governance and the economy," he says.

"We are seeing domestically and internationally that governments are unable to deal with these issues in isolation. There are linkages between them all which we see every day. Those questions, I think, will drive my future career." For now, rest assured that where there is discussion around climate change and environmental policy, both in Australia and abroad, Green will not be too far from the action.

"At some point I would like to work overseas. I have an interest in China and I think it is ground zero for many of these issues. How that country develops in the next 10 or 20 years will have a huge impact on whether or not we can respond to the global aspects of these issues, like climate change," he says.

"But for the moment, I am just enjoying learning and developing my professional skills and contributing to the fascinating, but often disturbing, public debate in Australia."

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