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
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.
