Whales are regarded as a totemic symbol by some nations and as a natural marine resource by others. This book presents a complex picture of legal problems surrounding the interpretation of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling and the role of its regulatory body, the International Whaling Commission. Contemporary whaling is about the competing interests of whaling nations (which are in the minority), non-whaling nations (which are in the majority) and indigenous peoples. Whales are covered by many international conventions, which has led to a very fragmented legal situation and does not necessarily ensure that whales are protected. This is one of the paradoxes of the contemporary international legal regime which are explored in this book. The book also examines the contentious issue of the right of indigenous peoples to whaling and questions whether indigenous whaling is very different from commercial practices.

Who will protect our planet from the corporations, governments, and individuals who pollute, destroy, and devastate our natural world?

Step forward a fresh new breed of passionately purposeful environmental lawyers, whose client is the Earth itself. At the head of this legal army stands James Thornton, who takes governments to court, and wins.

In Client Earth, we travel from Poland to Ghana, from Alaska to China, to see how citizens can use public interest law to protect our planet ― and our future.

This book explores the changing nature of international law and its ability to respond to the contemporary issues related to international environment, trade and information technology. The evolution of international law has reached a stage where we are witnessing diminishing power of the state and its capacity to deal with the economic matters challenging the existing notions of territory and sovereignty. Recent trends in international law and international relations show that states no longer have exclusive control over the decision-making process at the global level. Keeping this in mind, the book brings together the perspectives of various international and national scholars. The book considers diverse issues such as, sustainable development, climate change, global warming, Rio+20, technology transfer, agro-biodiversity and genetic resource, authority for protection of environment, human right to water, globalization, human rights, sui generis options in IP laws, impact of liberalization on higher education, regulation of international trade, intellectual property rights, collective administration of copyright, broadcast reproduction rights, implementation of copyright law, communication rights under copyright law, arbitration for IP disputes, doctrine of exhaustion of rights, trans-border reputation of trademark, information as an asset, cyber obscenity and pornography, e-governance, taxation of e-commerce, computer crime, information technology, domain names, research excellence in legal education, ideological perspective on legal education, challenges for law teachers, and clinical legal education. The topics, though diverse, are closely interrelated, with the common concern throughout being that the global environment, international trade, information technology and legal education need appropriate national normative and institutional responses as well as the global cooperation of members of the international community. Presenting reflections of a number of Asian, African and European scholars on these varied facets, the book is of great value to scholars, practitioners, teachers and students associated with contemporary international law.

Cross-border trade in electricity is rapidly expanding as a result of technical innovations, economic and geopolitical developments, and the ongoing decarbonisation of the electricity sector in response to climate change. The expansion of electricity networks and the integration of increasing shares of renewable energy (RE) electricity into the grid have made long-distance electricity flows both feasible and desirable. Drawing on the work of experts in trade and energy law and policy, and offering novel, multidisciplinary perspectives on the rapidly evolving landscape shaping international trade in electricity, this book examines the most important challenges - technical, economic, legal and policy-related - posed by long-distance and sustainable electricity trade. The book explores the regulatory implications of the policy instruments aimed at supporting RE electricity and considers how best to promote greater overall coherence in international electricity governance.

The international legal framework for valuing the carbon stored in forests, known as 'Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation' (REDD+), will have a major impact on indigenous peoples and forest communities. The REDD+ regime contains many assumptions about the identity, tenure and rights of indigenous and local communities who inhabit, use or claim rights to forested lands. The authors bring together expert analysis of public international law, climate change treaties, property law, human rights and indigenous customary land tenure to provide a systemic account of the laws governing forest carbon sequestration and their interaction. Their work covers recent developments in climate change law, including the Agreement from the Conference of the Parties in Paris that came into force in 2016. The Impact of Climate Change Mitigation on Indigenous and Forest Communities is a rich and much-needed contribution to contemporary understanding of this topic.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its companion agreement, the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC), provide important and often underappreciated protection for the environmental laws of the Party states: Canada, Mexico, and the United States. On the twentieth anniversary of NAFTA's ratification, this book assesses the current state of environmental protection under those agreements. Bringing together scholars, practitioners, and regulators from all three Party states, it outlines the scope and process of NAFTA and NAAEC, their impact on specific environmental issues, and paths to reform. It includes analyses of the impact of the agreements on such matters as bioengineered crops in Mexico, assessment of marine environmental effects, potential lessons for China, climate change, and indigenous rights. Together, the chapters of this book represent an important contribution to the global conversation concerning international trade agreements and sustainable development.

This book analyses the topical and contentious issue of the human rights impacts associated with carbon projects, especially in developing countries. It outlines a human rights-based approach to carbon finance as a functional framework for mainstreaming human rights into the design, approval, finance and implementation of carbon projects. It also describes the nature and scope of carbon projects, the available legal options for their financing and the key human rights issues at stake in their planning and execution. Written in a user-friendly style, the proposal for a rights-based due diligence framework through which human rights issues can be anticipated and addressed makes this book relevant to all stakeholders in carbon, energy, and environmental investments and projects.

Designed and modeled after a six-week introductory food law course taught at Northeastern University, Food Law and Regulation for Non-Lawyers offers a succinct overview of key topics and core concepts for food scientists, quality managers, and others who need to understand the regulation of food in the U.S. This second edition includes critical updates on the Food Safety Modernization Act-- the first change to the food safety laws in over 70 years. The seven foundational rules, finalized in 2015, are discussed in detail. The new edition also includes other regulatory updates such as the new Nutrition Fact Panel, changes to the definition of fiber, and the FDA's attempt to regulate the widely used "healthy" claim. These timely updates, along with the core concepts of the first edition, make the volume an essential and practical tool for regulatory professionals.

With the rapid growth of the renewable energy sector, it has become increasingly important to understand how renewable energy is defined in national laws around the world and what regulatory mechanisms these countries are deploying to achieve their renewable energy goals. In Renewable Energy Law: An International Assessment, Penelope J. Crossley compares the national renewable energy laws for each of the 113 countries that have such a law, shedding light on the question of whether energy laws are converging globally to facilitate trade or engaging in regulatory competition. The book includes over sixty extracts from different national laws, case studies on the European Union and the Chinese wind sector, and many examples of the particular challenges facing specific countries. This work should be read by scholars, policymakers, regulators, employees of commercial entities operating in the energy sector, and anyone else interested in the legal and regulatory landscape of renewable energy.

On April 20, 2010, the crew of the floating drill rig Deepwater Horizon lost control of the Macondo oil well forty miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. Escaping gas and oil ignited, destroying the rig, killing eleven crew members, and injuring dozens more. The emergency spiraled into the worst human-made economic and ecological disaster in Gulf Coast history. Senior systems engineers Earl Boebert and James Blossom offer the most comprehensive account to date of BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Sifting through a mountain of evidence generated by the largest civil trial in U.S. history, the authors challenge the commonly accepted explanation that the crew, operating under pressure to cut costs, made mistakes that were compounded by the failure of a key safety device. This explanation arose from legal, political, and public relations maneuvering over the billions of dollars in damages that were ultimately paid to compensate individuals and local businesses and repair the environment. But as this book makes clear, the blowout emerged from corporate and engineering decisions which, while individually innocuous, combined to create the disaster. Rather than focusing on blame, Boebert and Blossom use the complex interactions of technology, people, and procedures involved in the high-consequence enterprise of offshore drilling to illustrate a systems approach which contributes to a better understanding of how similar disasters emerge and how they can be prevented.

In 1944 the Chicago Convention set out the foundations of public international law regulating international air transport, but until 2016 no international agreement existed to limit its environmental impact. Sustainable Development, International Aviation, and Treaty Implementation explains why the CORSIA scheme, adopted by the International Civil Aviation Organization in 2016, should be implemented in 2020 even though the adequacy of this scheme is still open to doubt and criticism. This book seeks to examine the many dimensions of the effort to contain greenhouse gas emissions from aircraft in a manner consonant with the principles of sustainable development, and examines the development of international law and policy in an area that has remained largely outside the general framework of international environmental law. International civil aviation is a significant polluter of the atmosphere, and in this volume, a group of air law and sustainable development law specialists considers how the international community can respond.

In A Third Way, Hillary Hoffmann and Monte Mills detail the history, context, and future of the ongoing legal fight to protect indigenous cultures. At the federal level, this fight is shaped by the assumptions that led to current federal cultural protection laws, which many tribes and their allies are now reframing to better meet their cultural and sovereign priorities. At the state level, centuries of antipathy toward tribes are beginning to give way to collaborative and cooperative efforts that better reflect indigenous interests. Most critically, tribes themselves are building laws and legal structures that reflect and invigorate their own cultural values. Taken together, and evidenced by the recent worldwide support for indigenous cultural movements, events of the last decade signal a new era for indigenous cultural protection. This important work should be read by anyone interested in the legal reforms that will guide progress toward that future.

The absence of a globally recognized right to a healthy environment has not prevented the development of human rights norms relating to the environment. Indeed, one of the most noteworthy aspects of human rights law over the last twenty years is that UN treaty bodies, regional tribunals, special rapporteurs, and other human rights mechanisms have applied human rights law to environmental issues even without a stand-alone, justiciable human right to a healthy environment. In The Human Right to a Healthy Environment, a diverse set of scholars and practitioners, all of whom have been instrumental in defining the relationship between human rights and the environment, provide their thoughts on what is, or should be, the role of an international human right to a healthy environment. The right to a healthy environment could be a capstone to this field of law, could help to provide structure to it, or could move it in new directions.

The absence of a globally recognized right to a healthy environment has not prevented the development of human rights norms relating to the environment. Indeed, one of the most noteworthy aspects of human rights law over the last twenty years is that UN treaty bodies, regional tribunals, special rapporteurs, and other human rights mechanisms have applied human rights law to environmental issues even without a stand-alone, justiciable human right to a healthy environment. In The Human Right to a Healthy Environment, a diverse set of scholars and practitioners, all of whom have been instrumental in defining the relationship between human rights and the environment, provide their thoughts on what is, or should be, the role of an international human right to a healthy environment. The right to a healthy environment could be a capstone to this field of law, could help to provide structure to it, or could move it in new directions.

This book critically analyses the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, UNESCO's latest and ground-breaking treaty in the area of cultural heritage protection. Intangible cultural heritage is broadly understood as the social processes that inform our living cultures, and our social cohesion and identity as communities and peoples. On the basis of this conception, the Treaty proposes to turn our understanding of how, for whom, and why heritage is safeguarded on its head, by putting communities, groups and individuals at the centre of the safeguarding process. The commentary, written by leading experts in the field from all continents and multiple disciplines, provides an authoritative guide to interpreting and implementing not only this Treaty, but also its ripple effects on how we think about cultural heritage and our experience with it as a part of our living cultures. This book is of interest to lawyers, policy-makers, anthropologists, cultural diplomacy specialists, archaeologists, cultural heritage studies experts, and, foremost, the people who practice and enact this heritage.

Cities are no longer just places to live in. They are significant actors on the global stage, and nowhere is this trend more prominent than in the world of transnational climate change governance (TCCG). Through transnational networks that form links between cities, states, international organizations, corporations, and civil society, cities are developing and implementing norms, practices, and voluntary standards across national boundaries. In introducing cities as transnational lawmakers, Jolene Lin provides an exciting new perspective on climate change law and policy, offering novel insights about the reconfiguration of the state and the nature of international lawmaking as the involvement of cities in TCCG blurs the public/private divide and the traditional strictures of 'domestic' versus 'international'. This illuminating book should be read by anyone interested in understanding how cities - in many cases, more than the countries in which they're located - are addressing the causes and consequences of climate change.

Prevention is recognized as a cornerstone of international environmental law, but this principle remains abstract and elusive in terms of exactly what is required of states to prevent environmental harm. In this illuminating work, Leslie-Anne Duvic-Paoli addresses this issue by offering a systematic, comprehensive assessment in which she clarifies the rationale, content, and scope of the prevention principle while also placing it in a wider legal context. The book offers a detailed analysis of treaty law, custom codification works, and case law before culminating in a conceptualization of prevention based on three definitional traits: 1. Its anticipatory rationale; 2. Its due diligence content; and 3. Its wide spatial scope to protect the environment as a whole. This book should be read by anyone seeking to understand the evolving principle of prevention in international environmental law, and how it increasingly shares common ground with reparation in the arena of compliance control.

Despite a growing interest in critical social and political studies of climate change, the field remains fragmented and diffuse. This is the first volume to collect this body of scholarship, providing a key reference point in the growing debate about climate change across the social sciences. The book provides a new set of insights into the ways in which climate change is creating new forms of social order, and the ways in which they are structured through the workings of rationality, power and politics. Governing the Climate is invaluable for three main audiences: social science researchers and advanced students in the field of climate change; the wider research community interested in global environmental politics and global environmental governance; and policy makers and researchers concerned more broadly with environmental politics at international, national and local levels.

Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in August 2005 with devastating consequences. Almost all analyses of the disaster have been dedicated to the way the hurricane affected New Orleans. This volume examines the impact of Katrina on southern Mississippi. While communities along Mississippi's Gulf Coast shared the impact, their socioeconomic and demographic compositions varied widely, leading to different types and rates of recovery. This volume furthers our understanding of the pace of recovery and its geographic extent, and explores the role of inequalities in the recovery process and those antecedent conditions that could give rise to a 'recovery divide'. It will be especially appealing to researchers and advanced students of natural disasters and policy makers dealing with disaster consequences and recovery.

After the perceived failure of global approaches to tackling climate change, enthusiasm for local climate initiatives has blossomed world-wide, suggesting a more experimental approach to climate governance. Innovating Climate Governance: Moving Beyond Experiments looks critically at climate governance experimentation, focusing on how experimental outcomes become embedded in practices, rules and norms. Policy which encourages local action on climate change, rather than global burden-sharing, suggests a radically different approach to tackling climate issues. This book reflects on what climate governance experiments achieve, as well as what happens after and beyond these experiments. A bottom-up, polycentric approach is analyzed, exploring the outcomes of climate experiments and how they can have broader, transformative effects in society. Contributions offer a wide range of approaches and cover more than fifty empirical cases internationally, making this an ideal resource for academics and practitioners involved in studying, developing and evaluating climate governance.

Many international obligations are subject to exceptions. These can be expressed in several ways: an obligation may be vitiated by the presence of one of its constitutive negative requirements, an obligation may be set aside by the application of another more specific rule, or an actor might have a right to act in a certain way notwithstanding a contrary obligation. Exceptions are also of fundamental practical importance: for example, they affect the allocation of the burden of proof. This volume provides a systematic and analytic study of exceptions to legal obligations in international law and defences for breaches of these obligations. It features contributions written by legal philosophers, who introduce various theoretical approaches to the role of exceptions, and scholars of international law, who elaborate on generic issues applicable to exceptions in international law as well as examine specific issues arising from exceptions in their respective areas of expertise. Topics covered include the use of force, international criminal law, human rights, trade, investment, environment, and jurisdictional immunities.

This book examines the nuances of the relationship between development and environmental conservation policy in India over the last three decades. While India is taken as the focal point, the study extends to an analysis of global aspects and other developing countries as and when the situation demands. Understanding that development always has to take environmental issues into consideration, the book undertakes critical reviews of the different ways in which this has been done. The review is based on a grasp of the simultaneous developments in the theoretical understanding of the environment and ecosystems and provides pointers towards directions for possible change. The motivation for the book lies in the continuing distance between theoretical knowledge of the role of the environment, in particular the underlying long-term links between human wellbeing and wise use of nature, and its application in public policy. The book also proposes that whichever theoretical cornerstone is taken as the starting point, it is the ethical undertones that drive the analysis in directions that acquire meaning in terms of the quality and legitimacy of decision-making. It explores the relevance to policy of a variety of radical conceptual development and policy directions, such as dematerialising growth, the social metabolism approach and the degrowth movement. Further, the dilemma facing environmental policy continues to be how to simultaneously borrow from developments in and across disciplines while at the same time, and at a more practical level, dealing with a diversity of stakeholders.

Drawing specifically on the international climate regime, Simone Schiele examines international environmental regimes from a legal perspective and analyses a core feature of international regimes - their ability to evolve over time. In particular, she develops a theoretical framework based on general international law which allows for a thorough examination of the understanding of international law and the options for law-creation in international environmental regimes. The analysis therefore provides both a coherent understanding of the international climate regime and a starting point for further research in other regimes.

Cities play a pivotal but paradoxical role in the future of our planet. As world leaders and citizens grapple with the consequences of growth, pollution, climate change, and waste, urban sustainability has become a ubiquitous catchphrase and a beacon of hope. Yet, we know little about how the concept is implemented in daily life particularly with regard to questions of social justice and equity. This volume provides a unique and vital contribution to ongoing conversations about urban sustainability by looking beyond the promises, propaganda, and policies associated with the concept in order to explore both its mythic meanings and the practical implications in a variety of everyday contexts. The authors present ethnographic studies from cities in eleven countries and six continents. Each chapter highlights the universalized assumptions underlying interpretations of sustainability while elucidating the diverse and contradictory ways in which people understand, incorporate, advocate for, and reject sustainability in the course of their daily lives."

Economic production indicators such as gross domestic product (GDP) and the Human Development Index (HDI) fail to reflect the state of natural resources or ecological conditions and both focus exclusively on the short term. The Inclusive Wealth Report 2014 is the second book in an important biennial series that provides a new framework for measuring the inclusive wealth of nations. It provides an overview of how the capital asset components of inclusive wealth evolved between 1990 and 2010, and analyses the meaning of these trends for sustainability. While the asset base studied is largely unchanged from the 2012 report, the country sample has been expanded from 20 to 140 nations and the focus has shifted from natural to human capital. This report offers a wealth of information for researchers and policy-makers, identifying key gaps in data and knowledge, and suggesting specific needs for future research.