This chapter looks, inter alia, at how international law has been used or could be used to help tackle the most significant environmental challenge of our time. This challenge is global climate change. Not many topics provide a good illustration of the importance of a globally inclusive regulatory regime focused on preventive and precautionary approaches to environmental harm—or of the problems of negotiating one on such a complex subject. Solutions to global climate change have not been easily forthcoming. The chapter looks at the efforts of the international regulatory regime to address these challenges by recourse to novel ‘market based’ mechanisms and differential treatment. An example is the post-Kyoto scheme for reducing greenhouse gas emissions through ‘nationally determined contributions’. In the end, the chapter argues, it is likely to be technology that enables us to grapple with the causes of climate change, not law, but law can drive technological change, as it has with ozone depletion and acid rain.
Chapter
6. Climate Change and Atmospheric Pollution
Chapter
7. The regulation of environmental protection
Stuart Bell, Donald McGillivray, Ole W. Pedersen, Emma Lees, and Elen Stokes
This chapter introduces the system of environmental regulation by building upon Ch. 4, which examined the sources of environmental law. In practice, environmental regulation involves more than the use of legal rules that forbid pollution and other forms of environmental harm. ‘Regulation’ is used to describe a wide range of different tools used in both legal and non-legal contexts—for example, it covers mandatory rules contained in environmental legislation, as well as non-binding environmental standards. The chapter outlines some of the reasons for regulating to protect the environment, before explaining how such regulation is introduced, applied, enforced, and reviewed. It examines the characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses of different approaches to standard-setting and the various instruments used to regulate potentially environmentally damaging activities. The chapter discusses several trends in modern environmental regulation, including the policy emphasis on deregulation and the use of information disclosure as a means of governing group or individual behaviour.
Chapter
14. Green criminology
Avi Brisman and Nigel South
Criminology must maintain relevance in a changing world and engage with new challenges. Perhaps pre-eminent among those facing the planet today are threats to the natural environment and, by extension, to human health and rights and to other species. A green criminology has emerged as a (now well established) criminological perspective that addresses a wide range of harms, offences, and crimes related to the environment and environmental victims. This chapter provides a review of green criminological work on climate change, consumption and waste, state-corporate and organized crimes, animal abuse, and wildlife trafficking. It also considers the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches to regulation and control.
