Ocean Law and Coastal Law have grown rapidly in the past three decades as specialty areas within natural resources law and environmental law. The protection of oceans has received increased attention in the past decade because of the global overfishing crisis, widespread depletion of marine living resources (such as marine mammals and coral reefs), and oil pollution. During this same period, climate change regulation has emerged as a focus of international environmental diplomacy, and has gained increased attention in the wake of disturbing and abrupt climate change related impacts throughout the world that have profound implications for ocean and coastal regulation and marine resources. Climate Change Impacts on Ocean and Coastal Law effectively brings together the two worlds of climate change and ocean and coastal management. It raises important questions about whether and how ocean and coastal law will respond to the regulatory challenges that climate change presents to resources in the oceans and coasts of the U.S. and the world. This comprehensive work assembles the insights of global experts from academia and major NGOs (e.g., Center for International Environmental Law, Ocean Conservancy, and Environmental Law Institute) to address regulatory challenges from the perspectives of U.S. law, foreign domestic law, and international law.

Ecosystem Management and Sustainability analyzes myriad human-initiated processes and tools developed to foster sustainable natural resource use, preservation, and restoration. It also examines how humans interact with plant, marine, and animal life in both natural and human-altered environments. Experts explain the complex ecosystem relationships that result from invasive species, roads, fencing, and even our homes by addressing topics such as fire and groundwater management, disturbance, and ecosystem resilience. Because most people in the 21st century live in urban environments, the volume pays special attention to the ecology of cities, with detailed coverage on topics ranging from urban agriculture to landscape architecture. The volume focuses on how ecosystems across the world can be restored, maintained, and used productively and sustainably.

Comparative Ocean Governance examines the world's attempts to improve ocean governance through place-based management - marine protected areas, ocean zoning, marine spatial planning - and evaluates this growing trend in light of the advent of climate change and its impacts on the seas. This monograph opens with an explanation of the economics of the oceans and their value to the global environment and the earth's population, the long-term stressors that have impacted oceans, and the new threats to ocean sustainability that climate change poses. It then examines the international framework for ocean management and coastal nations' increasing adoption of place-based governance regimes. The final section explores how these place-based management regimes intersect with climate change adaptation efforts, either accidentally or intentionally. It then offers suggestions for making place-based marine management even more flexible and responsive for the future. Environmental law scholars, legislators and policy makers, marine scientists, and all those concerned for the welfare of the world's oceans will find this book of great value.

Comparative Ocean Governance examines the world's attempts to improve ocean governance through place-based management - marine protected areas, ocean zoning, marine spatial planning - and evaluates this growing trend in light of the advent of climate change and its impacts on the seas. This monograph opens with an explanation of the economics of the oceans and their value to the global environment and the earth's population, the long-term stressors that have impacted oceans, and the new threats to ocean sustainability that climate change poses. It then examines the international framework for ocean management and coastal nations' increasing adoption of place-based governance regimes. The final section explores how these place-based management regimes intersect with climate change adaptation efforts, either accidentally or intentionally. It then offers suggestions for making place-based marine management even more flexible and responsive for the future. Environmental law scholars, legislators and policy makers, marine scientists, and all those concerned for the welfare of the world's oceans will find this book of great value.

The world is at a critical moment, when humans must grapple with thinking about the planet’s oceans from ecological, physical, social, and legal perspectives. Warming ocean temperatures, changing currents, cultural displacement, Indigenous resilience, melting polar ice, habitat loss, are but a few of the global issues reflected in the planetary ocean as a front line in the unfolding drama of climate change. Re-Envisioning the Anthropocene Ocean brings together leading scientists, lawyers, humanists, and Indigenous voices to tell of the ocean’s precarious position in the twenty-first century. The contributors affirm that the planetary ocean is crucial to our well-being and overdue for a positive change in public action to enhance the world’s resilience to climate change, ocean acidification, and other stressors. These essays begin that crucial work of positively re-imagining the ocean in the Anthropocene. This volume brings diverse perspectives to the planet’s ocean future. New essays are contextualized with narratives woven from earlier ocean writers, showing readers how past perceptions of the ocean have led us to where we are today in terms of both problems and potential new visions. In this one volume, readers experience both the history of humanity’s multi- and interdisciplinary interactions with the ocean, find new perspectives on that history, and discover ideas for looking forward.

The world is at a critical moment, when humans must grapple with thinking about the planet’s oceans from ecological, physical, social, and legal perspectives. Warming ocean temperatures, changing currents, cultural displacement, Indigenous resilience, melting polar ice, habitat loss, are but a few of the global issues reflected in the planetary ocean as a front line in the unfolding drama of climate change. Re-Envisioning the Anthropocene Ocean brings together leading scientists, lawyers, humanists, and Indigenous voices to tell of the ocean’s precarious position in the twenty-first century. The contributors affirm that the planetary ocean is crucial to our well-being and overdue for a positive change in public action to enhance the world’s resilience to climate change, ocean acidification, and other stressors. These essays begin that crucial work of positively re-imagining the ocean in the Anthropocene. This volume brings diverse perspectives to the planet’s ocean future. New essays are contextualized with narratives woven from earlier ocean writers, showing readers how past perceptions of the ocean have led us to where we are today in terms of both problems and potential new visions. In this one volume, readers experience both the history of humanity’s multi- and interdisciplinary interactions with the ocean, find new perspectives on that history, and discover ideas for looking forward.

The time has come for us to collectively reexamine-and ultimately move past-the concept of sustainability in environmental and natural resources law and management. The continued invocation of sustainability in policy discussions ignores the emerging reality of the Anthropocene, which is creating a world characterized by extreme complexity, radical uncertainty, and unprecedented change. From a legal and policy perspective, we must face the impossibility of even defining-let alone pursuing-a goal of "sustainability" in such a world. Melinda Harm Benson and Robin Kundis Craig propose resilience as a more realistic and workable communitarian approach to environmental governance. American environmental and natural resources laws date to the early 1970s, when the steady-state "Balance of Nature" model was in vogue-a model that ecologists have long since rejected, even before adding the complication of climate change. In the Anthropocene, a new era in which humans are the key agent of change on the planet, these laws (and American culture more generally) need to embrace new narratives of complex ecosystems and humans' role as part of them-narratives exemplified by cultural tricksters and resilience theory. Updating Aldo Leopold's vision of nature and humanity as a single community for the Anthropocene, Benson and Craig argue that the narrative of resilience integrates humans back into the complex social and ecological system known as Earth. As such, it empowers humans to act for a better future through law and policy despite the very real challenges of climate change Melinda Harm Benson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of New Mexico.