This ground-breaking volume provides analyses from experts around the globe on the part played by national and international law, through legislation and the courts, in advancing efforts to tackle climate change, and what needs to be done in the future. Published under the auspices of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law (BIICL), the volume builds on an event convened at BIICL, which brought together academics, legal practitioners and NGO representatives. The volume offers not only the insights from that event, but also additional materials, sollicited to offer the reader a more complete picture of how climate change litigation is evolving in a global perspective, highlighting both opportunities, and constraints.
This book examines how litigation over climate change shapes the choices of governments, corporations and the public regarding mitigation and adaptation.
This book is based on the acknowledgment that climate change is a multifaceted challenge that requires action on the part of all stakeholders, including civil society, and the notion that climate change is at a tipping point with urgent measures needed in the next decade. Against this background, civil society is turning its attention to the courts as a means to directly influence climate action, partly because of the global scepticism towards the progress of global climate action, despite the ongoing implementation of the Paris Agreement. Focusing on the individual, broadly representing civil society, the book offers fresh perspectives on climate change litigation. While most of the literature on climate change litigation examines the same specific jurisdictions, mostly common law countries (US and Australia in particular), this book also considers specific countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America with little or no climate change litigation. It explores the reasons for the lack of litigation and discusses what measures should or could be taken to change this situation and push forward climate action. Unlike other literature on the subject, this book analyses climate change litigation using a scenario-based methodology. Combining rigorous academic analysis with a practical policy-oriented focus, the book provides valuable insights for a wide range of stakeholders interested in climate change litigation. It appeals to civil society organisations around the world, international organisations and law firms interested in climate change litigation.
This is the first scholarly examination of climate change litigation in the Asia Pacific region. Bringing legal academics and lawyers from the Global South and Global North together, this book provides rich insights into how litigation can galvanize climate action in countries including Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia and China. Written in clear and accessible language, the fourteen chapters in this book shed light on the important question of how litigation may unfold as a potential regulatory pathway towards decarbonization in the world's most populous region.
Courts have emerged as a crucial battleground in efforts to regulate climate change. Over the past several years, tribunals at every level of government around the world have seen claims regarding greenhouse gas emissions and impacts. These cases rely on diverse legal theories, but all focus on government regulation of climate change or the actions of major corporate emitters. This book explores climate actions in state and national courts, as well as international tribunals, in order to explain their regulatory significance. It demonstrates the role that these cases play in broader debates over climate policy and argues that they serve as an important force in pressuring governments and emitters to address this crucial problem. As law firms and public interest organizations increasingly develop climate practice areas, the book serves as a crucial resource for practitioners, policymakers and academics.
A perfect introduction to climate change law, this textbook offers students and scholars an overview of the international law governing this fundamental issue. It demonstrates how to interpret the language used in the applicable instruments and conventions, and sets climate change law in its broader international legal context.
Do anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions affect human rights? Should fundamental rights constrain climate policies? Scientific evidence demonstrates that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions contribute to increasing atmospheric temperatures, soon passing the compromising threshold of 2° C. Consequences such as Typhoon Haiyan prove that climate alteration has the potential to significantly impair basic human needs. Although the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and human rights regulatory regimes have so far proceeded separately, awareness is arising about their reciprocal implications. Based on tripartite fundamental obligations, this volume explores the relationship between climate change and interdependent human rights, through the lens of an international and comparative perspective. Along the lines of the metaphor of the ‘wall’, the research ultimately investigates the possibility of overcoming the divide between universal rights and climate change, and underlying barriers. This book aims to be a useful resource not only for practitioners, policymakers, academics, and students in international, comparative, environmental law and politics and human rights, but also for the wider public.
Climate Change and the Law is the first scholarly effort to systematically address doctrinal issues related to climate law as an emergent legal discipline. It assembles some of the most recognized experts in the field to identify relevant trends and common themes from a variety of geographic and professional perspectives. In a remarkably short time span, climate change has become deeply embedded in important areas of the law. As a global challenge calling for collective action, climate change has elicited substantial rulemaking at the international plane, percolating through the broader legal system to the regional, national and local levels. More than other areas of law, the normative and practical framework dedicated to climate change has embraced new instruments and softened traditional boundaries between formal and informal, public and private, substantive and procedural; so ubiquitous is the reach of relevant rules nowadays that scholars routinely devote attention to the intersection of climate change and more established fields of legal study, such as international trade law. Climate Change and the Law explores the rich diversity of international, regional, national, sub-national and transnational legal responses to climate change. Is climate law emerging as a new legal discipline? If so, what shared objectives and concepts define it? How does climate law relate to other areas of law? Such questions lie at the heart of this new book, whose thirty chapters cover doctrinal questions as well as a range of thematic and regional case studies. As Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), states in her preface, these chapters collectively provide a “review of the emergence of a new discipline, its core principles and legal techniques, and its relationship and potential interaction with other disciplines.”
What can trade regulation contribute towards ameliorating the GHG emissions and reducing their concentrations in the atmosphere? This collection of essays analyses options for climate-change mitigation through the lens of the trade lawyer. By examining international law, and in particular the relevant WTO agreements, the authors address the areas of potential conflict between international trade law and international law on climate mitigation and, where possible, suggest ways to strengthen mutual supportiveness between the two regimes. They do so taking into account the drivers of human-induced climate change in energy markets and of consumption.
