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Books > Law > International law > Public international law > International environmental law
This book critically examines the extension of EU environmental
legislation beyond EU borders through measures that determine
access to the single market on the basis of processes that take
place in third countries. It makes a timely contribution to
political debates about the relations between EU and non-EU
countries, and the Union's role in the global governance of
environmental policy, where it has been considered a global leader.
The book aims to identify and explain the emerging legal phenomenon
of internal environmental measures with extraterritorial
implications as an important manifestation of EU global regulatory
power, and assesses the extraterritorial reach of EU environmental
law from a legitimacy perspective. It examines mechanisms that can
bolster its legitimacy, focusing on the legal orders of the EU and
the World Trade Organization, which are key legal fora for
controlling the EU's global regulatory power.
In the international law of the 21st century, more and more
regulation comes in the form of post-treaty rules. Developed in
environmental law, this trend increasingly spreads to areas ranging
from tobacco regulation to arms trade. This book offers the first
systematic examination of these decisions, resolutions and
recommendations adopted by treaty bodies, to assess their
effectiveness. The study shows that the authority of such rules is
in question as, in practice, treaty parties retain almost complete
discretion when it comes to their implementation. This conclusion
gives rise to two key questions. To what extent does this ambiguous
authority affect adherence to procedural principles like legal
certainty, non-arbitrariness and the duty to state reasons? And can
the legitimacy of the process and content of post-treaty rules fill
the gaps in their authority? In assessing these questions, the
study shines a light on this crucial but neglected area in
international law scholarship and forms a starting point for
improvements and reform.
The recent Brexit debates present leaving the European Union
largely as a threat to environmental protection, and to
environmental law. This exciting and important new work argues that
Brexit represents a real opportunity for environmental protection
in the United Kingdom, freeing it from a pan-European framework not
necessarily fit for UK domestic purposes. Central to the argument
is the belief that environmental protection, in the United Kingdom,
can most effectively be pursued through established domestic
institutions, looking inwards at 'local' challenges and outwards at
more global ones, all the while drawing on considerable historical
experience. The book is designed to address rather than dismiss
those concerns raised by environmental lawyers after the outcome of
the referendum. Provocative and compelling, it offers an
alternative vision of the UK environmental law framework outside of
the European Union.
The last decade has witnessed an increasing focus on the
relationship between climate change and human rights. Several
international human rights bodies have expressed concern about the
negative implications of climate change for the enjoyment of human
rights, and the Paris Agreement is the first multilateral climate
agreement to refer explicitly to states' human rights obligations
in connection with climate change. Yet despite this, there are
still significant gaps in our understanding of the role of
international human rights law in enhancing accountability for
climate action or inaction. As the Paris Agreement has shifted the
focus of the climate change regime towards voluntary action, and
the humanitarian impacts of climate change are increasingly being
felt around the world, accountability for climate change has become
an increasingly salient issue. This book offers a timely and
comprehensive analysis of the legal issues related to
accountability for the human rights impact of climate change,
drawing on the state responsibility regime. It explains when and
where state action relating to climate change may amount to a
violation of human rights, and evaluates various avenues of legal
redress available to victims. The overall analysis offers a
perceptive insight into the potential of innovative rights-based
climate actions to shape climate and energy policies around the
world.
This book argues for a reframing of environmental law. It starts
from the premise that all environmental issues confront lawmakers
as emergencies. Environmental issues pose a fundamental challenge
to law because it is impossible to reliably predict which issues
contain the possibility of an emergency and what to do in response
to such an unforeseen event. These features undermine the
conventional understanding of the rule of law. This book argues
that approaching environmental issues from the emergency
perspective leads us to an understanding of the rule of law that
requires public justification. This requirement recentres the
debates in environmental law around the question of why governance
under the rule of law is something worth having in the
environmental context. It elaborates what the rule of law requires
of decision-makers in light of our ever-present vulnerability to
catastrophic environmental harm. Controversial, compelling and
above all timely, this book presents an important new perspective
on environmental law.
Environmental law has aesthetic dimensions. Aesthetic values have
shaped the making of environmental law, and in turn such law
governs many of our nature-based sensory experiences. Aesthetics is
also integral to understanding the very fabric of environmental
law, in its institutions, procedures and discourses. The Art of
Environmental Law, the first book of its kind, brings new insights
into the importance of aesthetic issues in a variety of domains of
environmental governance around the world, from climate change to
biodiversity conservation. It also argues for aesthetics, and
relatedly the arts, to be taken more seriously in the practice of
environmental law so as to improve our emotional and ethical
capacities to address the upheavals of the Anthropocene.
Climate and energy policy needs to be durable and flexible to be
successful, but these two concepts often seem to be in opposition.
One venerable institution where both ideas are apparent is the
Clean Air Act, first passed by the United States Congress in 1963,
with amendments in 1970 and 1990. The Act is a living institution
that has been hugely successful in improving the environment. It
has programs that reach across the entire economy, regulating
various sectors and pollutants in different ways. This illuminating
book examines these successes - and failures - with the aim to
offer lessons for future climate and energy policymaking in the US
at the federal and state level. It provides critical information to
legislators, regulators, and scholars interested in understanding
environmental policymaking.
The last decade has witnessed an increasing focus on the
relationship between climate change and human rights. Several
international human rights bodies have expressed concern about the
negative implications of climate change for the enjoyment of human
rights, and the Paris Agreement is the first multilateral climate
agreement to refer explicitly to states' human rights obligations
in connection with climate change. Yet despite this, there are
still significant gaps in our understanding of the role of
international human rights law in enhancing accountability for
climate action or inaction. As the Paris Agreement has shifted the
focus of the climate change regime towards voluntary action, and
the humanitarian impacts of climate change are increasingly being
felt around the world, accountability for climate change has become
an increasingly salient issue. This book offers a timely and
comprehensive analysis of the legal issues related to
accountability for the human rights impact of climate change,
drawing on the state responsibility regime. It explains when and
where state action relating to climate change may amount to a
violation of human rights, and evaluates various avenues of legal
redress available to victims. The overall analysis offers a
perceptive insight into the potential of innovative rights-based
climate actions to shape climate and energy policies around the
world.
This Handbook is the first comprehensive account of comparative
environmental law. It examines in detail the methodological
foundations of the discipline as well as the substance of
environmental law across countries from four vantage points:
country studies from all continents, responses to common problems
(including air pollution, water management, nature conservation,
genetically modified organisms, climate change and energy,
chemicals, waste), foundational components of environmental law
systems (including principles, property rights, administrative and
judicial organisation, command-and-control regulation, market
mechanisms, informational techniques and liability mechanisms), and
common interactions of environmental protection with the broader
public, private, and criminal law contexts. The volume brings
together the foremost authorities in this field from around the
world to provide a concise, self-contained, and technically
rigorous account of environmental law as a single overall system.
This book explores the means by which economic liberalisation can
be reconciled with human rights and environmental protection in the
regulation of international trade. It is primarily concerned with
identifying the lessons the international community can learn,
specifically in the context of the WTO, from decades of European
Community and Union experience in facing this question. The book
demonstrates first that it is possible to reconcile the pursuit of
economic and non-economic interests, that the EU has found a
mechanism by which to do so, and that the application of the
principle of proportionality is fundamental to the realisation of
this. It is argued that the EU approach can be characterised as a
practical application of the principle of sustainable development.
Secondly, from the analysis of the EU experience, this book
identifies fundamental conditions crucial to achieving this
'reconciliation'. Thirdly, the book explores the implications of
lessons from the EU experience for the international community. In
so doing it assesses both the potential and limits of the existing
international regulatory framework for such reconciliation. The
book develops a deeper understanding of the inter-relationship
between the legal regulation of economic and non-economic
development, adding clarity to the debate in a controversial area.
It argues that a more holistic approach to the consideration of
'development', encompassing economic and non-economic concerns -
'sustainable' development - is not only desirable in principle but
realisable in practice.
Transboundary watercourses account for an estimated 60 per cent of
global freshwater flow and support the livelihoods of hundreds of
millions of people worldwide. Yet the indeterminate status of water
rights in many international watercourses presents a problem and
many attempts to resolve water rights issue have failed. Knowing
how and where negotiations fail is essential if successful
resolution is to be achieved. Muserref Yetim's important book seeks
to illustrate a means to the peaceful resolution of natural
resource based conflicts. Through a detailed study of the
Tigris-Euphrates water conflict, involving Turkey, Syria and Iraq,
countries of vital security interest to the world at large, the
author clarifies the collective action dilemmas confronting Middle
Eastern watercourses and reveals the bargaining bottlenecks where
negotiations fail. She develops an original framework that explains
bargaining failures and proposes conditions for creating a new
property rights regime among watercourse states that offers a route
to governing their shared water resources in ways that are
politically, economically and environmentally sound. In almost all
water scarce regions, international water resources are subject to
intense unilateral exploitation in a highly competitive fashion.
And as demand for freshwater continues to increase, through
increasing urbanization and the continuing development of
societies, so the issue of how such shared water resources can best
be governed is becoming vitally important. Negotiating
International Water Rights offers both a timely contribution to a
matter of international concern and important insights into
resource conflict in countries of vital security interest to the
world at large.
Volume VI in the Critical Issues in Environmental Taxation series
contains an interdisciplinary, selection of peer-reviewed papers
written by international experts in the field. The volume contains
nearly forty articles written by authors representing disciplines
such as law, economics, accounting, taxation, environmental policy
and political sciences. The articles were selected from papers
presented at the Eighth Annual Global Conference on Environmental
Taxation in October 2007 in Munich, Germany.
The book is clearly structured with the articles divided into parts
and organized by topic. Part 1 it features analysis of the effect
of environmental tax policies on innovation, technology, and
competitiveness, Part 2 on implementation issues, Part 3 on issues
relating to energy and innovation, Part 4 on land use, planning,
and conservation and Part 5 closes with papers dealing with
international approaches to environmental taxation that use
market-based instruments.
The book and its sister volumes in the series are a unique and
invaluable resource for anyone interested in the next generation of
policy instruments for transitioning to sustainable economies.
The proliferation of environmental agreements is a defining feature
of modern international relations that has attracted considerable
academic attention. The cooperation literature focuses on stories
of policy creation, and ignores issue areas where policy agreements
are absent. Science and International Environmental Policy
introduces nonregimes into the study of global governance, and
compares successes with failures in the formation of environmental
treaties. By exploring collective decisions not to cooperate, it
explains why international institutions form but also why, when,
and how they do not emerge. The book is a structured comparison of
global policy responses to four ecological problems: deforestation,
coral reefs degradation, ozone depletion, and acid rain. It
explores the connection between knowledge and action in world
politics by investigating the role of scientific information in
environmental management. The study shows that different types of
expert information play uneven roles in policymaking. Extensive
analysis of multilateral scientific assessments, participatory
observation of negotiations, and interviews with policymakers and
scientists reveal that some kinds of information are critical
requirements for policy creation while other types are less
influential. Moreover, the state of knowledge on ecological
problems is not a function of sociopolitical power. By
disaggregating the concept of 'knowledge,' the book solves
contradictions in previous theoretical work and offers a compelling
account of the interplay between knowledge, interests, and power in
global environmental politics.
This book juxtaposes international environmental norms and
practiceswith relevant Asian policies and their applications in key
areas. RodaMushkat examines the fundamental principle of public
participation inenvironmental law-making, as well as the "rights
approach,"against the emergence of democratic and human rights
norms in theregion. The complex relationship between trade and the
environment isalso discussed in light of the strong regional
emphasis on economicgrowth, trade liberalization, and the aversion
to conditionalities.Given regionalization processes in Asia-Pacific
and elsewhere, thiswork seeks to establish to what extent such
processes have led to theregionalization of international
environmental law.
The tension between trade liberalisation and environmental
protection has received remarkable attention since the
establishment of the WTO. It has been the subject of a wide-ranging
debate, and is one of the central themes of the anti-globalisation
movement. This book explores that debate. It argues that by
focusing on the WTO, the debate has failed to recognise the
institutional and discursive complexity in which the
trade-environment conflict is embedded. A legal investigation of
this nexus requires a framework of inquiry, in which this
complexity can be elucidated - a model of global legal pluralism.
The first theoretical part of the book (Chapters One and Two)
responds to this challenge by developing a pluralistic model, which
recognises the trade and environment conflict as the product of
multiple dilemmas, constituted and negotiated by a myriad of
institutional and discursive networks. As such, this conflict
cannot be understood or addressed through one-dimensional models.
Viewing the trade-environment conflict through a pluralistic
perspective yields important practical insights. It means that this
conflict cannot be resolved by uniform economic or legal formulae.
Dealing with this conflict requires, rather, polycentric and
contextual strategy. The empirical part of the book (Chapters Three
to Seven) explicates this thesis by examining several global legal
domains, ranging from the WTO to 'private' transnational regimes
such as transnational litigation, international construction law
and international financial law. This part demonstrates how the
different discursive and institutional structures of these domains
have influenced the contours of the trade-environment conflict, and
considers the policy implications of this diversity from a
pro-environmental perspective.
As an environmental issue transcending national boundaries, the
spread of toxic substances in the environment, with harmful
consequences for ecosystems and human health, has become the focus
of transnational regulatory efforts in a variety of international
fora. In order to address the problems created by transboundary
toxic movements a set of binding as well as non-binding norms are
being developed at the European and international level. This book
analyzes the development and effectiveness of transnational toxics
law through two case studies: one dealing with the European
regional regime for the control of toxic discharges in the aquatic
environment and the other looking at the emerging global regime for
the regulation of international trade in hazardous pesticides. It
provides a comprehensive analysis of the legal and political
framework in EC law for the reduction of inputs of hazardous
substances in the marine and freshwater environment, and in
regional agreements for the protection of the marine environment of
the North Sea and Northeast Atlantic, Baltic Sea and Mediterranean.
It also offers a critical account of the development of soft and
hard law regulating exports of banned and severely restricted
pesticides from industrialized to developing countries; from the
resolutions of the United Nations Environment Programme and General
Assembly in the late 1970s, to the signing of the Rotterdam
Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure in 1998. The
author shows that international normative efforts in these two
fields have proved much more productive in establishing procedural
obligations for states than in laying down actual substantive
standards to govern their conduct, and argues that transnational
environmental law may be valued by governments more for its
symbolic, value-expressive function, than for any real
problem-solving capacity.
In the 1970s the world became aware of a huge danger: the
destruction of the stratospheric ozone layer by CFCs escaping into
the atmosphere, and the damage this could do to human health and
the food chain. So great was the threat that by 1987 the UN had
succeeded in coordinating an international treaty to phase out
emissions; which, over the following 15 years has been implemented.
It has been hailed as an outstanding success. It needed the
participation of all the parties: governments, industry,
scientists, campaigners, NGOs and the media, and is a model for
future treaties. This volume provides the authoritative and
comprehensive history of the whole process from the earliest
warning signs to the present. It is an invaluable record for all
those involved and a necessary reference for future negotiations to
a wide range of scholars, students and professionals.
After the completion of the Uruguay Round and the adoption of the
1994 agreement establishing the WTO,the place of international
trade in the context of the international legal order has radically
changed. International trade law has become a subject of
wide-spread interest, cutting across traditional boundaries, and
engaging diverse political and legal concerns. One consquence of
this development is increasing concern with the legitimacy of the
WTO process, which in turn has led to the WTO becoming the focus of
rancorous protest by, among others, environmental NGOs, trade
unions, and human rights activists. This collection of essays by
leading scholars and lawyers engaged in the policy-making process,
addresses the underlying tensions and dilemmas of the WTO process
and its impact upon the environment and human rights in particular.
The contributors search for a balance between, on the one hand,
legitimate free trade interests and, on the other, the role and
limits of unilateral measures as an instrument to protect
non-commercial values. The essays thus range over a host of topical
questions including: trade in GMOs, biosafety in intellectual
property rights, technology transfer and environmental protection,
trade and labour rights, child labour standards, the EU and WTO,
MERCOSUR, and many other topics. The contributors include: Thomas
Schoenbaum, Andrea Bianchi, Chris McCrudden, Michael Spence, Sarah
Cleveland, Patricia Hansen, Riccardo Pavoni, and Francesco
Francioni.
This is one of the few books dealing with regime theory to be
written from a legal point of view. Jurgielewicz's book is part of
an effort to promote interdisciplinary research on the nature of
the international legal order. Her work explores the concept of
international regimes within the international legal order,
utilizing the policy-oriented approach to international law. The
study uses examples of global environmental change as models. By
examining the general international law applicable to climate
change and ozone layer depletion, the author attempts to explain
the original need for regime formation in these areas. Next,
Jurgielewicz looks at the role of regimes within international law,
focusing on their formation, maintenance, source of legal
obligation, and compliance mechanisms. The book concludes that
regimes are present within the international legal order and play a
vital role in maintaining that order. This book will appeal to
students in law schools, graduate schools, or advanced
undergraduate seminars covering international relations,
international legal theory, international law, and international
organizations.
International law is increasingly applied in the field of natural
resources. This reflects the current and challenging problem of
mankind, namely how should increasingly rare natural resources or
commodities be explored and exploited. This collection draws on the
experts in the field to explore questions such as mining and human
rights; national resources and investment law; and authority over
natural resources. Though asking probing questions from different
sectors, each contribution keeps the big picture and the underlying
conditions in mind to answer the collection’s research questions
with one voice.
This book evaluates the global response to climate change from a
cosmopolitan justice perspective. Going above and beyond existing
studies, Dietzel neatly illustrates that climate justice theory can
be used to normatively assess and compare both state (multilateral)
and non-state (transnational) climate change governance - or, in
other words, that theory and practice can be bridged. Investigating
the role of states, cities, corporations, and non-governmental
organisations in the post-Paris Agreement era, Dietzel provides
fresh insight into the 'big picture' of climate change
(mis)management and the injustices that come along with it. These
insights allow her to make recommendations for change that should
be of keen interest to climate justice scholars and climate
governance practitioners alike.
In Data Innovations for Transboundary Freshwater Resources
Management: Are Obligations Related to Information Exchange Still
Needed?, Christina Leb discusses how technology innovations disrupt
the conventional methods of data and information exchange and the
potential impact this may have on international water law.
Cross-border data and information exchange is one of the most
challenging issues for transboundary water management. Only a small
number of treaties include direct obligations related to mutual
data and information exchange. Technological innovations related to
real-time data availability, space technology and earth observation
have led to an increase in quality and availability of
hydrological, meteorological and geo-spatial data. These
innovations open new avenues for access to water related data and
transform data and information exchange globally. This monograph is
an exploratory assessment of the potential impacts of these
disruptive technologies on data and information exchange
obligations in international water law.
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