This chapter examines the fast-moving area of law relating to climate change. This includes a considerable body of public international law, from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to the legally innovative Paris Agreement 2015. The chapter also considers legal developments at the EU and UK levels, which both contain a rich body of climate law and policy. The EU and the UK are both seen as ‘world leaders’ in climate law and policy. In EU law, this is due to the EU greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme and the EU’s leadership in advocating ambitious greenhouse gas mitigation targets and in implementing these targets flexibly across the EU Member States through a range of regulatory mechanisms. The UK introduced path-breaking climate legislation in the Climate Change Act 2008, which provided an inspiring model of climate governance, legally entrenching long-term planning for both mitigation and adaptation. The chapter concludes with an exploration of climate litigation, a new and growing field of inquiry.
Chapter
18. Climate Change Law
Chapter
15. Climate change
Stuart Bell, Donald McGillivray, Ole W. Pedersen, Emma Lees, and Elen Stokes
This chapter discusses the international, European, and domestic initiatives adopted in response to climate change. The focus is on the development of the international legal regime found in the United Nations Framework Convention and other areas of international law, including human rights law, as well as EU law. The chapter also explores the domestic responses found in the Climate Change Act 2008 with its focus on long-term targets and the legal significance of these.
Chapter
31. Climate Change
Lavanya Rajamani
Climate change is considered to be the greatest threat to human rights of our generation. This chapter discusses the challenges posed by climate change and mitigation measures to the enjoyment of human rights and the obligations that states have under international human rights law to respond to these challenges. It introduces international climate change law and how this has developed to accommodate human rights concerns. The chapter ends by surveying the recent turn to national and international litigation, whereby human rights arguments have been deployed to force states to adequately respond to climate change.
Chapter
19. The protection of the environment
This chapter studies the development of international environmental law. A significant proportion of international environmental law obligations is contained in treaties, which often provide for institutional mechanisms or procedural obligations for their implementation. There exists a dense network of treaty obligations relating to environmental protection, and to specific sectors such as climate change, the conservation of endangered species, or the handling of toxic materials. Indeed, though customary international law knows of no general legal obligation to protect and preserve the environment, certain customary rules nevertheless have been found in specific treaties, case law, and occasionally even soft law instruments. The most significant such rule is the principles of prevention, often taking the form of the ‘good neighbour’ principle. States are required to exercise due diligence in preventing their territory from being used in such a way so as to cause significant damage to the environment of another state.
Chapter
15. Legal aspects of the protection of the environment
This chapter discusses the role of international law in addressing environmental problems. It reviews the salient legal principles: the preventive principle, the precautionary principle, the concept of sustainable development, the polluter-pays principle, the sic utere tuo principle, and the obligation of environmental impact assessment. It gives an overview of the key multilateral conventions covering traffic in endangered species, protection of the ozone layer, transboundary movement of hazardous wastes, climate change, and protection of the marine environment.
