This article asks whether the abandonment of drifting fish aggregating devices (dFADs) is illegal under international marine pollution law. To answer this question, it provides a brief overview of the general international legal framework for the protection of the marine environment as well as specific legal regimes, namely the London Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter (LC), its 1996 Protocol (LP), and Annex V of the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL). The article concludes that the abandonment of dFADs contravenes the LC/LP and/or, depending on the preferred interpretation, MARPOL Annex V. The decision as to which of the two regimes is applicable depends on whether dFAD abandonment can be classified as ‘incidental to, or derived from the normal operations of vessels … and their equipment’ or not. The negligent loss of dFADs always violates MARPOL Annex V. The article also shows that certain state practice and opinio juris suggests a parallel applicability of the two regimes with respect to deliberate dFAD abandonment. While such a development would ensure more comprehensive coverage of the relevant standards and prohibitions, a clear regulatory decision as to which of the two regimes is the correct one would be preferable from an implementation and enforcement perspective.

This article argues that the Rights of Nature (RoN) framework is compatible with various ideological outlooks and political options. As a result, those initiatives may translate into extremely diverse institutional implementations with contrasted outcomes in terms of power distribution. The institutional design of RoN has deep political implications for various social groups who hold conflicting claims over certain territories. Hence, rather than transforming human-nature relations, RoN primarily transform the power relations between human communities. I delve into three conceptual frameworks that could shape the recognition of RoN and explore their respective distributive implications: green colonialism, environmental justice, and the focus on Indigeneity. Through this critical engagement, I wish to warn against the illusion of a post-political ecology where an ecocentric legal declaration would deliver human-nature harmony without deep political battles, social tensions, and economic confrontations. RoN as an abstract notion does not offer a ready-made toolkit to dismantle the legal architecture of fossil capitalism; nor does it provide clear guidance on the distribution of costs and benefits of the green transition.

Over the course of 2021, several local councils across the island of Ireland introduced motions recognizing the ‘Rights of Nature’. To date, little research has been conducted into these nascent Rights of Nature movements, even though they raise important questions about the philosophical, cultural, political, and legal drivers in pursuing such rights. Similarly, much remains unclear as to the implications of such initiatives, both in their domestic context and for Rights of Nature movements around the world. This article contributes to addressing this gap by exploring these themes through an analysis of interviews with key stakeholders conducted across the island of Ireland in June 2022. In particular, it explores the impact of international movements, colonial legacies, cultural heritage, and years of inadequate environmental governance, in motivating local councils to pursue a Rights of Nature strategy.

Floods are not merely ‘natural’ disasters; rather, they emerge as socio-natural phenomena shaped by political, social, and economic processes. Law plays a pivotal role in producing and sustaining these processes and contributes to the creation of unjust environments. Drawing on political ecology and environmental history, this article analyzes the role of law and its interactions with colonialism and capitalism in the Damodar river valley in Eastern India. The Damodar river valley is an intensely engineered and hazardous region, a site of multiple interventions and developmental and ecological experiments for over a century. Colonial and post-colonial legacies have left a lasting imprint on legal, policy, and institutional frameworks, establishing a path-dependent trajectory for addressing future climate change adaptation challenges. While focusing on a specific case study, the article's approach and findings have broader significance, especially in the context of climate adaptation. The central argument underscores the need to understand the political and legal dimensions of flooding, and reinforces the need for a shift beyond incremental adjustments that do not tackle the underlying structures that produce the injustices associated with floods. It highlights the importance of ‘transformative adaptation’ approaches that address the root causes of climate-related disasters, such as restructuring power relations between actors, reconfiguring governance structures, and scrutinizing ideologies that mediate how water is used and distributed.

This article maps the shared legal anatomy of climate and environmental lawsuits, in which plaintiffs claim protection for future generations before domestic or international courts. By closely analyzing the litigation strategies of plaintiffs and the inquiry of courts, the article argues that these proceedings revolve around structurally similar legal standards across domestic and international jurisdictions, which correspond to five normative requirements flowing from the rule of law: namely, respect for human rights, certain quality of law requirements, prohibition of arbitrary exercise of governmental powers, non-discrimination, and access to justice. The cross-jurisdictional analysis shows that courts appear to be increasingly willing to protect future generations against arbitrary treatment by present-day decision makers. The article appraises whether such an intergenerationally sensitive reinterpretation of the rule of law could help to change the short-termist paradigm of environmental and climate law.

Climate change litigation is developing rapidly and pervasively, emerging as a space for legal innovation. Until now, this process has occurred mainly in national courts. The result is a decentralization of the interpretation of human rights relating to climate change. This article argues that such decentralization could, in principle, have a destabilizing impact on claims to the universality of human rights. However, close examination of this litigation shows that a prototype is emerging, certain features of which are becoming ‘hard wired’ through the process of judicial dialogue. By exploring the content of this prototype, its decentralized development, and its self-reinforcing nature, we see a legal space emerging in which environmental human rights sit between the universal and the contextual.

In civil law jurisdictions, plants have traditionally been classified as ‘objects’ (or ‘things’) under private law, reflecting an age-old tendency, certainly in the Western world, to underestimate and undervalue plants. Recent legal debates increasingly acknowledge the special nature of plants. Perhaps the most eye-catching debate in this context is the one on Rights of Nature, which have much potential but pose some practical and conceptual challenges. We propose an additional way of acknowledging the special nature of plants in a legal context: de-objectifying plants in private law and thereby explicating that they are not mere objects. Numerous civil codes already separate animals from objects, often – though not exclusively – based on the sentience of animals. Recent scientific research suggests that plants may be sentient, too. We aim to open the debate on the de-objectification of plants, based on their sentience, in civil codes as a feasible and unobtrusive way to acknowledge in law that plants are living beings, and more than mere things.

Carbon leakage – the increase of greenhouse gas emissions in foreign jurisdictions following the introduction of domestic or regional climate mitigation measures – raises key questions in the climate change debate. This includes whether carbon leakage constitutes a threat to the environmental integrity of climate policies and, if so, how this could be mitigated. Through the use of four hypothetical models of international climate change regime, this article argues that international climate change law is a key factor in answering this two-part question. Firstly, the article demonstrates that the architecture of international climate change law affects whether carbon leakage can be considered as undermining the mitigation objective of climate policies. Secondly, it draws attention to the interaction – and potential tension – between carbon leakage prevention measures and international climate change law.

Climate policies are often evaluated using criteria that are heterogeneous and misaligned with the stated aims of these policies. By combining legal research methods with insights from economic theory, we systematically map and analyze the legal objectives of the European Union (EU) Emissions Trading System (ETS), a key climate policy instrument. We find that the EU ETS is shaped by a nuanced internal normative framework, the principal goal of which is emissions reduction, combined with three secondary goals of cost-effectiveness, economic efficiency and equity, and a meta-goal of coherence. Based on the contents and interrelations of these legal objectives, we formulate evaluation criteria that can be used to critically analyze and evaluate the EU ETS performance in a more comprehensive, transparent, and comparable manner. The resulting methodology is applicable to other environmental policies and jurisdictions.

This article examines how carbon dioxide (CO2) removal credits can be integrated into the European Union (EU) Emissions Trading System (ETS), focusing on questions of permanence and climate liability. It identifies challenges within the integration process and analyzes approaches from practice and literature to cultivate learning. These approaches apply different strategies to address the issue of permanence, including temporary credit issuance, granting credits once a certain number of carbon tonne-years have been accumulated, or issuing credits at the beginning of the project period and relying on liability instead. Drawing from the findings of this research, the article presents legal considerations that may inform a proposal for an EU legislative act on the integration of carbon removal credits into the EU ETS. It suggests that only credits issued for permanent CO2 removal should be integrated to ensure the environmental integrity of the system. Furthermore, the liability of the project operator should transfer to the Member State under certain conditions to make liability risks more predictable.

Recent years have seen a sharp increase in the number of cases being brought before national courts addressing the constitutional rights of children and future generations (FG) in the context of environmental protection. These cases have required courts to devote increasing attention to a wide-ranging and complicated array of constitutional rights claims involving the short- and longer-term impacts of environmental harm on children and FG. This article argues that both litigation and judicial efforts in this area have been hampered by the lack of precision of definitions of ‘future generations’ under comparative constitutional and international human rights law, in particular vis-à-vis children. This lack of precision poses a major challenge to both the delineation and enforcement of rights claims in the context of such litigation. After outlining how these cases are being brought and how courts are addressing (or not) the complexities involved in defining children and FG respectively, the article highlights the lack of authoritative definitions of FG in comparative constitutional law – a lacuna that, the author argues, is exacerbated by the ongoing lack of a clear definition of FG in the international human rights law context. The article concludes by identifying key challenges faced by litigators and courts seeking to engage with the rights of children and FG that result from this definitional gap.

The Paris Agreement, related intergovernmental decisions, and transnational climate change governance initiatives mobilize data as a means of measuring, managing, and addressing changing climatic conditions. At the same time, the Paris Agreement formally acknowledges the human rights implications of the unfolding climate crisis. Given the reliance on data and rights in climate change governance, the aim of this article is twofold. Firstly, it analyzes how processes of datafication at transnational and local levels promise, yet struggle, to render the climate governable. Secondly, the article critically reflects on the capacity of human rights to complement datafied governance processes meaningfully – specifically, in what ways rights can (and cannot) alleviate local concerns regarding datafication. Methodologically, the article develops a perspective that foregrounds situated sense-making and experience in place. It is based on an empirical case study of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy, a transnational alliance of cities that have committed to working towards the goals of the Paris Agreement; and it engages with ethnographic literature that conceptualizes rights as lived forms of meaning-making, articulation, struggle, and resistance. Attending to place, the article confronts problematic assumptions about the universality, neutrality, and representativeness of data and rights, raising critical questions about their capacity to ‘govern’ climate change.

Hydrogen is playing an increasingly important role in China's energy and climate policy, with significant implications for the development of a global hydrogen industry. However, China's approach to the regulation of hydrogen, and, in particular, the role of local authorities in promoting hydrogen refuelling stations and fuel cell vehicles, has so far received limited scholarly attention. This article aims to contribute to the literature on hydrogen regulation and to the transnational environmental law scholarship on decentralization by examining how China promotes hydrogen at the national and local levels. The case of China shows how, in jurisdictions with a sufficient degree of decentralization, local initiatives can play a key role in driving the development of hydrogen. By testing different approaches to hydrogen regulation, local experimentation helps to manage the uncertainties associated with this new energy source. At the same time, China's experience confirms the ‘environmental federalism’ theory on the importance of regulatory harmonization to reduce transaction costs and local protectionism. As the Chinese government develops its national regulatory approach on hydrogen, it has the opportunity to take into account both local and international experience and engage with other major economies in an effort to promote an internationally harmonized regulatory landscape.

Storytelling is essential in climate litigation. The narratives that are told in and around legal cases shape public discourse and our collective imagination regarding the climate crisis. The stories that plaintiffs and their lawyers choose to highlight hold immense power to either reinforce or challenge dominant assumptions and worldviews. This article analyzes how storytelling has been utilized in climate lawsuits, with a particular focus on those that involve future generations. It highlights the need to craft narratives that foreground entanglement and relationality rather than notions of competing interests. We offer recommendations for strategically using storytelling and framing techniques to build public engagement, spur equitable climate action and transform legal systems.

The Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 is a landmark piece of sustainable development legislation and marks a significant development in the emerging legal identity of Wales. Despite the Act's significance and ambition, it has been criticized as merely ‘aspirational’ – as ‘non-law-bearing’ and unenforceable by legal means. The Act is not without difficulties. However, it also has notable legal and other qualities that are often not captured within the standard justiciability-enforceability frame of analysis. Our aim here is to broaden the context for examining the Act and other ‘aspirational’ legislation like it. To that end, we identify three sets of questions that help to bring out different ideas around the Act's varied enforceability, its possible constitutional status, and its potential role as a bearer of hope.

After more than three decades of negotiations, the international response to climate change under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) appears to have come full circle. At COP27, parties to the UNFCCC agreed to establish a multilateral fund to address loss and damage from global temperature rise, an idea that was initially put forward by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in the early 1990s. Employing a historical critique, which draws upon archival and doctrinal research and interviews with key informants who participated in the early days of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a Framework Convention on Climate Change, this article examines the AOSIS proposal in its wider historical context, and provides reflections for the renewed endeavour to negotiate a multilateral fund on loss and damage, in particular with a view to achieving justice for climate victims.