Sustainable development (or sustainability) is a decision-making framework for maintaining and achieving human well-being, both in the present and into the future. The framework requires both consideration and the achievement of environmental protection, social justice and economic development. In that framework, environmental protection must be integrated into decisions about social and economic development, and social justice and economic viability must be integrated into decisions about environmental quality.

As sustainable development has grown in prominence, its critics have become more numerous and more vocal. Three major lines of criticism are that the term is ‘too boring’ to command public attention, ‘too vague’ to provide guidance, and ‘too late’ to address the world’s problems. Critics suggest goals such as abundance, environmental integrity, and resilience. Beginning with the international agreements that have shaped the concept of sustainable development, this article provides a functional and historical analysis of the meaning of sustainable development. It then analyzes and responds to each of the above criticisms. It argues that the critics, understood constructively, suggest ways of strengthening this framework, but do not provide a compelling alternative. The challenge for lawyers, lawmakers, and others is to use and improve the sustainability framework to make better decisions.

The European Union (EU) aims to ensure a high level of environmental protection. This is a key message of primary EU law. This article explores the purpose and meaning of this explicit ambition. It deciphers its influence on case law and on judicial review of legislative and administrative discretion. It argues that the requirement goes beyond window dressing and that its added value lies both in supporting the legitimacy of bold decisions and in preventing a manifest dismissal of the requisites of environmental protection.

Although primarily focused on EU law and on its technicalities, the article may offer helpful insights to other transnational or federal systems. It may help to build a better understanding of some of the challenges facing any environmental law regime confronted with the sensitive issue of ‘ambition’.

There is no definitive approach to assessing the effectiveness of international environmental regimes. In order to explore the regime established by the 1979 Geneva Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution this article broadly integrates the approach to effectiveness taken by Peter H. Sand in The Effectiveness of International Environmental Agreements, and Daniel Bodansky in The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law. The article finds that compliance, institutional, and normative effectiveness can be evaluated relatively confidently. An effectiveness assessment of the long-range transboundary air pollution (LRTAP) regime indicates that, on the whole, it has helped states to reach agreement on contentious issues and achieve results in air pollution reduction. However, it faces significant challenges with regard to participation, implementation procedures, empowerment of domestic stakeholders, and funding. The article provides an in-depth and up-to-date look at the LRTAP regime, including the most recent amendments and its relationship with European Union and international law.

Increasing investment in agricultural land by global corporations and investors from wealthy developed nations in poorer, less developed countries has significant human rights and environmental impacts. Proponents of such land deals argue that they provide opportunities for improvements in agricultural practices and generate employment, which will benefit economic growth in host countries. However, there is growing evidence that the phenomenon known as ‘land grabbing’ displaces poor and vulnerable populations and damages the environment, which in turn exacerbates poverty and food insecurity. This article explores the impact of land grabbing in Ethiopia and examines the human rights and sustainable development frameworks within which land grabbing takes place. The article argues that a human rights approach is fundamental to reconcile the sustainable development imperatives of economic development and environmental protection in the context of land grabbing. It advocates an integrated human rights and sustainable development approach as a holistic framework for assessing the impact of land grabbing and for the development of policy and regulatory responses.

To support carbon markets, regulators must engage in a continuous process of learning. This article explores offsets regulation in the compliance markets of Europe, the United States and China, alongside the Clean Development Mechanism, to identify what has been learnt since offsets were initiated. We argue that offsets regulation must learn to work with demands for commercial viability, environmental sustainability and political legitimacy. We find that the learning here recommends greater control of the shares, sectors, sources and standards of offsets than was initially chosen. The findings provide some cautious optimism about the scope for improvements to such market mechanisms.

Since the 1990s, a number of local and regional governments around the world have started to engage in a real international or ‘paradiplomatic’ climate agenda. While the multilevel governance approach has advanced the examination of the actors and levels involved in climate governance, there is within this body of literature a limited consideration of the legal capacity of non-state actors to act across scales. This article addresses this gap and examines the potential limitations imposed on subnational diplomacy by international and domestic legal orders. The article draws upon the example of Brazil where, despite constitutional limitations on the involvement of subnational governments in international relations, paradiplomacy has been termed ‘federative diplomacy’ and institutionalized within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and within the Presidency of the Republic. The article shows that the diplomatic activity of local and regional governments is still constrained by international and domestic legal frameworks. If cities and regions are to help in addressing the inadequacies of the international climate regime, then domestic and international legal frameworks will need to further accommodate subnational diplomatic activities.

The Kyoto Protocol is remarkable among global multilateral environmental agreements for its efforts to depoliticize compliance. However, attempts to create autonomous, arm’s length and rule-based compliance processes with extensive reliance on putatively neutral experts were only partially realized in practice in the first commitment period from 2008 to 2012. In particular, the procedurally constrained facilitative powers vested in the Facilitative Branch were circumvented, and expert review teams (ERTs) assumed pivotal roles in compliance facilitation. The ad hoc diplomatic and facilitative practices engaged in by these small teams of technical experts raise questions about the reliability and consistency of the compliance process. For the future operation of the Kyoto compliance system, it is suggested that ERTs should be confined to more technical and procedural roles, in line with their expertise. There would then be greater scope for the Facilitative Branch to assume a more comprehensive facilitative role, safeguarded by due process guarantees, in accordance with its mandate. However, if – as appears likely – the future compliance trajectories under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will include a significant role for ERTs without oversight by the Compliance Committee, it is important to develop appropriate procedural safeguards that reflect and shape the various technical and political roles these teams currently play.

Liability for causing or failing to mitigate climate change has long been proposed as an alternative, or backstop, to lagging international cooperation. Thus far, there has been very limited success in holding governments or individuals responsible for the emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) that are considered the primary cause of anthropogenic climate change. The recent landmark decision in Urgenda Foundation v. Government of the Netherlands (Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment) breaks with this tradition. In June 2015, the Dutch District Court (The Hague) held that the current climate policies of the government are not sufficiently ambitious for it to fulfil its duty of care towards Dutch society. The judgment, and the accompanying order for the government to adopt stricter GHG reduction policies, raises important questions about the future of climate change liability litigation, the separation of powers between the judiciary and the legislature, and the effect of litigation on international climate change negotiation and cooperation.

This article proposes an Arctic Ocean Coordinating Agreement (AOCA) as a framework for more effective coordination and sharing of practices regarding national conservation and management policies in the marine Arctic. It envisions a nimble, versatile body that operates without creating new institutions and focuses instead on convening and coordinating existing individuals and institutions whose expertise can assist the Arctic states with questions that the Arctic states define. The AOCA could incorporate aspects of regional seas agreements (RSAs) into a less formal regional arrangement that would differ significantly from traditional RSAs. Identifying the Arctic Council as the right entity to launch AOCA discussions, the article proposes that an AOCA should draw on entities already engaged in work relevant to the emerging challenges in the Arctic Ocean: the Helsinki and OSPAR Commissions, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES), and other institutions that have successfully convened appropriate sets of actors for targeted responses to shared marine management concerns around the world.

Three sets of social institutions deal with catastrophic risk: government regulation through rule making, the market, and civil liability. Climate disasters expose the limitations of all of these social institutions and often result in extensive uncompensated losses, particularly in developing countries. The author proposes the establishment of a fossil fuel-funded Climate Disaster Response Fund to compensate victims for the ‘residual’ risk of climate disasters in developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. This Fund, established under the UNFCCC’s Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage Associated with Climate Change Impacts, would comprise levies placed on the world’s top 200 fossil fuel companies. This proposal is modelled on various domestic and international funds which have been established to overcome the difficulties posed by tort law and which require companies to pay for the hazardous consequences of their activities and products. Precedents include funds to compensate for the damage caused by toxic chemicals, oil pollution spills, asbestos and nuclear accidents.

Meat production and the transport sector contribute almost equally to global warming. However, unlike the transport sector, in terms of climate change policies meat production is relatively unregulated. Many scientists have called for a meat tax as a means of reducing consumption but governments and politicians have not responded. Has the law been an obstacle to the acceptance of a meat tax? To address that question, this article analyzes three examples of European Union (EU) taxes that could be imposed on the consumption of domestic and imported meat, and examines them in relation to the international climate change regime, human rights law, and the legal regimes of the World Trade Organization and the EU. It shows that, if carefully designed, an EU meat tax is consistent with these bodies of law. To address adequately the industrial sectors that give rise to global warming, governments will need to overcome the taboo relating to the concept of a meat tax.

Why do some countries adopt constitutional environmental rights while others do not? This article uses qualitative content analysis of interviews conducted in Kathmandu (Nepal) and Colombo (Sri Lanka) to analyze the cases of Nepal, which adopted a constitutional environmental right in the 2007 Interim Constitution, and Sri Lanka, which has not enacted such a right in any of its governing charters. It finds that the presence of a constitutional environmental right in Nepal and the absence of such a right in Sri Lanka can be best explained directly with reference to domestic political conditions and structures, and indirectly in terms of the international normative environment in which the constitution was written. The article outlines a research agenda which focuses on evaluating the impacts of constitutional environmental rights. This research provides important insights into the process of constitutional design in developing states and the translation of international norms in domestic contexts.

Climate change is a global environmental problem which has been addressed primarily at the multilateral level. However, national, supranational, and even subnational action on the issue has also sprung up. At the subnational level, California (United States) and Acre (Brazil) offer an interesting example of how domestic policies may be linked in order to address climate change. Based on a memorandum of understanding concluded in 2010, these two states have been working towards the possible linkage of their respective climate change policies, in essence providing a pathway for using emissions offset credits that are generated in Acre through reductions of forest-based emissions in the Californian cap-and-trade programme. Taking into account that this is an ongoing process, this commentary provides a general overview of the issue from the perspective of international law.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) judgment in Whaling in the Antarctic, a dispute brought by Australia against Japan, found that Japan had violated the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW) moratoria on all commercial whaling and the use of factory ships to process whales, and also the prohibition on whaling in the Southern Ocean Sanctuary. In the course of analyzing whether special permits issued by Japan qualified for the scientific whaling exemption under Article VIII ICRW, the Court benefited from a more robust scientific fact-finding process than at times in the past. The judgment emphasized the mutual obligations of this multilateral agreement by taking the view that the provisions of the ICRW’s scientific whaling exemptions are neither self-judging nor subject to a ‘margin of appreciation’ in favour of a state party claiming the exemption. The case was driven by conflicting attitudes towards commercial whaling, and also towards global common spaces. The ICJ’s decision and Japan’s response indicate the limits of the ICRW in resolving those differences.