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Background

With efforts increasing worldwide to understand and treat paranoia, there is a pressing need for cross-culturally valid assessments of paranoid beliefs. The recently developed Revised Green et al., Paranoid Thoughts Scale (R-GPTS) constitutes an easy to administer self-report assessment of mild ideas of reference and more severe persecutory thoughts. Moreover, it comes with clinical cut-offs for increased usability in research and clinical practice. With multiple translations of the R-GPTS already available and in use, a formal test of its measurement invariance is now needed.

Methods

Using data from a multinational cross-sectional online survey in the UK, USA, Australia, Germany, and Hong Kong (N = 2510), we performed confirmatory factory analyses on the R-GPTS and tested for measurement invariance across sites.

Results

We found sufficient fit for the two-factor structure (ideas of reference, persecutory thoughts) of the R-GPTS across cultures. Measurement invariance was found for the persecutory thoughts subscale, indicating that it does measure the same construct across the tested samples in the same way. For ideas of reference, we found no scalar invariance, which was traced back to (mostly higher) item intercepts in the Hong Kong sample.

Conclusion

We found sufficient invariance for the persecutory thoughts scale, which is of substantial practical importance, as it is used for the screening of clinical paranoia. A direct comparison of the ideas of reference sum-scores between cultures, however, may lead to an over-estimation of these milder forms of paranoia in some (non-western) cultures.

Private ‘bottom-up’ enforcement has been central to the efforts of the European Union (EU) to promote effective compliance with its ambitious environmental laws. This approach is strengthened by the EU's implementation of the Aarhus Convention, which aims to democratize environmental enforcement by conferring citizens and environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) with legal rights of access to environmental information, rights of public participation, and rights of access to justice (the so-called ‘Aarhus mechanisms’). This article empirically assesses the extent to which the Aarhus mechanisms empower ENGOs to take an active role in the private enforcement of the EU Habitats and Birds Directives. Based on 75 surveys and 30 interviews with ENGOs from three Member States (France, Ireland, the Netherlands), we apply regulatory intermediary theory to show how European ENGOs play a vital role in intermediating between (i) EU Member States and their citizens, (ii) the EU and individual citizens, and even (iii) the EU and its Member States. We bring new empirical insights into the role of law as an enabler of regulatory intermediaries, and its potential as a tool for orchestrating regulatory intermediaries.

Background

The term ‘pandemic paranoia’ has been coined to refer to heightened levels of mistrust and suspicion towards other people specifically due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, we examine the international prevalence of pandemic paranoia in the general population and its associated sociodemographic profile.

Methods

A representative international sample of general population adults (N = 2510) from five sites (USA N = 535, Germany N = 516, UK N = 512, Australia N = 502 and Hong Kong N = 445) were recruited using stratified quota sampling (for age, sex, educational attainment) and completed the Pandemic Paranoia Scale (PPS).

Results

The overall prevalence rate of pandemic paranoia was 19%, and was highest in Australia and lowest in Germany. On the subscales of the PPS, prevalence was 11% for persecutory threat, 29% for paranoid conspiracy and 37% for interpersonal mistrust. Site and general paranoia significantly predicted pandemic paranoia. Sociodemographic variables (lower age, higher population size and income, being male, employed and no migrant status) explained additional variance and significantly improved prediction of pandemic paranoia.

Conclusions

Pandemic paranoia was relatively common in a representative sample of the general population across five international sites. Sociodemographic variables explained a small but significant amount of the variance in pandemic paranoia.

EU Environmental Law is a critical, comprehensive and engaging account of the essential and emerging issues in European environmental law and regulation today. Suitable for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, the book delivers a thematic and contextual treatment of the subject for those taking courses in environmental law, environmental studies, regulation and public policy, and government and international relations. Placing the key issues in context, EU Environmental Law takes an interdisciplinary and thematic approach to help students to better understand the implementation and enforcement of environmental law and policy across Europe. It offers an accessible overview, and links theory with practical applications that will allow students to contextualise the outcomes of legal rules and their impact on public and private behaviours. It provides a definitive account of the subject, examining traditional topics such as nature conservation law, waste law and water law, alongside increasingly important fields such as the law of climate change, environmental human rights law, and regulation of GMOs and nanotechnology.

Summary

Introduction: The Enforcement Deficit in EU Environmental Law

The foundation for short- and long-term improvements in Europe's environment, people's health and economic prosperity rests on full implementation of policies, and better integration of the environment into the sectoral policies that contribute most to environmental pressures and impacts.

EEA, The European Environment: State and Outlook 2015: Synthesis Report (European Environment Agency, Copenhagen), 15.

It is evident that, without adequate enforcement, EU environmental law will be ineffective. While the scope of substantive EU environmental law continues to expand, we are not witnessing the parallel improvement in the state of the European environment that one might expect.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, the need to improve the governance and enforcement of EU environmental law has been a major theme in recent years. This has focused on efforts to improve the rather poor record of under-enforcement of EU environmental law, and efforts to improve environmental governance by bringing the EU's laws, and those of its Member States, into line with the 1998 Aarhus Convention. In setting out the key elements of the legal regime for enforcing EU environmental law at EU and national levels, this chapter considers each of these trends.

It would be wrong, of course, to blame the failure of the EU to meet its environmental quality aims entirely on under-enforcement of EU environmental law. In many vital areas, agreement has not been reached at EU level on appropriate legislation (as, for instance, in the case of the proposed Soil Framework Directive, the proposal for which was withdrawn in 2014, and in the case of the proposed Access to Justice Directive, discussed further below). More broadly, many fundamental problems result not from the content and (lack of) enforcement of EU environmental legislation as such, but from the lack of consideration given to environmental concerns in non-environmental legislation, in the sense of legislation with a legal basis other than Article 192 TFEU, in breach of the integration principle considered in Chapter 3. Nonetheless, a significant improvement in the enforcement of EU environmental law would bring undeniable benefits, not only from an environmental quality perspective, but also in terms of ensuring a basic respect for the rule of law within the EU.

Summary

Air pollution regulation was a relative late bloomer on the European Union environmental policy agenda. The main building blocks for EU water and waste policy were laid down in a series of seminal 1970s Directives. By comparison, it took until approximately 1980 for the EU to develop a somewhat cohesive air pollution policy.

This is at first sight surprising because air pollution is a quintessentially transboundary problem. The textbook example of Scandinavian acid rain and deforestation, caused by sulphur dioxide (SO2) emitted from British industrial chimneys and blown across the North Sea, vividly illustrates the transnational nature of air pollution as an environmental challenge. Yet it also provides a first clue to understanding an important contributory cause for any delay in action. The vision of SO2 migrating across the North Sea is, after all, a mental image; there are no puffy, jaundiced clouds of pollutants genuinely to be perceived. It is also very difficult to discern air pollution on an experiential level: we rely on scientists to tell us that, for example, the ozone layer is thinning and that, somewhere down the line, this affects our well-being. Even more so than water pollution, air pollution as a political issue struggles with problems of visibility. The low visibility of impacts may have also supported an assumption that, in contrast to water pollution and, say, the protection of wild birds, air pollution was reasonably well controlled at the national level and therefore less dependent on early EU intervention.

Yet recent reports resoundingly affirm that any complacency with regard to the health and environmental effects of atmospheric emissions would be fatally misconceived. A European Environment Agency (EEA) Report of 2014 estimates that, over a five-year period (2008–2012), the costs of air pollution from industrial facilities amount to between €329 billion and €1,053 billion. At the same time, the United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) Sixth Global Environment Outlook Report identifies poor air quality as ‘the single largest health risk to the population in Europe’. The World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe reported that ‘Exposure to air pollution accounted for 7 million deaths worldwide in 2012, including almost 600,000 in the WHO European Region.’

Summary

Introduction

Many of the EU's most influential health and environmental provisions are embedded in product regulation. The adoption of harmonised standards for the manufacture and trade of goods is a fundamental pillar of the EU's market liberalisation strategy, so it is unsurprising that the European Union has a rich tradition in product regulation. To a significant degree, the first generations of EU health and environmental product standards represented an attempt to eliminate regulatory barriers to intra-EU trade that would otherwise result from differences in national attitudes towards technological risks. A very prominent area of early EU activity was the regulation of trade in chemicals: in 1967, the then European Economic Community adopted a landmark Directive to harmonise the classification, packaging and labelling of dangerous substances. The Directive's primary goal was to facilitate the free circulation of chemical substances and preparations within the internal market. In doing so, however, it simultaneously hammered out a skeleton approach towards the integration of health and environmental considerations, as the harmonisation exercise fostered the identification of a minimum set of ‘dangerous characteristics’ that would trigger classification and labelling requirements, and spurred the adoption of a minimum set of health, safety and, in due course, environmental packaging requirements.

Several factors explain the heavy focus on chemicals in EU product regulation. The chemicals sector was and continues to be a major pillar of the EU economy. Over time, it has also become a quintessentially European sector: a small majority of all chemicals produced in the EU are traded with other Member States. Moreover, chemicals are the very building blocks of our heavily technology-dependent consumer society: chemicals, and the products derived from them, constitute part of every single industrial production and service delivery cycle across the world. Think away a steady supply of chemical substances and mixtures, and the world as we know it comes to a grinding halt.

A third reason why chemicals are a hub of regulatory attention relates to the serious health and environmental risks associated with their production, trade and use. This rationale became more prominent as the EU matured into a fully fledged environmental regulator. That chemicals pose health and environmental risks is hardly revelatory.

Summary

Introduction

Climate change is the world's greatest environmental challenge. It jeopardises long-term economic and political stability across the globe. It is the most encompassing and disruptive man-made threat ever confronted by societies past or present.

People may disagree about the intensity and distribution of climate change impacts but (in Europe at least) some things are now commonly accepted as fact. As confirmed in the 5th Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there is a 95 per cent scientific consensus that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) are causing global temperatures to rise on an unprecedentedly steep incline. Under business as usual circumstances, the planet could heat up by more than 5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. To reiterate but a handful of the more cataclysmic predicted consequences of the business as usual scenario: polar icecaps will melt; many island States will be wiped off the face of the earth; even more countries will lose significant land mass to rising sea levels; changed climatological conditions will exacerbate flooding and trigger more extreme weather events; and rising temperatures will have dramatic impacts on ecosystems, unleashing a stream of towering challenges to human habitation, biodiversity protection, agriculture, forestry and fisheries.

Climate change will leave no corner of the planet unaffected, but the impacts will be very unevenly distributed. In a cruel twist of fate, the poorest countries with the smallest carbon footprints are likely to be the most heavily affected. The 2007 ‘Stern Review’ estimated that, in the event of the 5 degrees’ temperature rise, climate change will result in global GDP loss of between 5 per cent and 10 per cent. Recent reports suggest that this estimate may well be too conservative. Many of the cities that are expected to see the fastest increase in GDP over the coming decades, including Dhaka in Bangladesh and Mumbai in India, are at an extreme risk of climate change. As their proportion of global GDP rises, so will the impact of climate change on global GDP.

Summary

This chapter discusses the role of the key institutions and actors involved in formulating EU environmental law and policy, focusing on:

Summary

Economic expansion is not an end in itself: its first aim should be to enable disparities in living conditions to be reduced … It should result in an improvement in the quality of life as well as in standards of living. As befits the genius of Europe, particular attention will be given to intangible values and to protecting the environment so that progress may really be put at the service of mankind.

Paris Declaration of the Heads of State or Government of the EEC Member States, 20 October 1972

History and Development of the European Union's Environmental Policy

The original EEC Treaty contained no express mention of environmental policy, in part due to the essentially economic aims of that Treaty, and in part because, when the Treaty was drawn up in the late 1950s, the field of ‘environmental’ law, in the sense of a discrete body of rules governing the way that we interrelate with our natural surroundings, barely existed in the signatory Member States (though national laws had long existed governing certain aspects of the current field, in the form of rules on private property and public health). At international level, a collection of rules was just beginning to emerge in discrete environment-related areas, a process which had begun with the bilateral fisheries treaties of the mid-nineteenth century and in which the 1949 United Nations Conference on the Conservation and Utilisation of Resources (UNCCUR) was a landmark event. These developments undoubtedly contributed to the subsequent emergence of Community environmental law.

While environmental discourse became increasingly prevalent in the late 1950s and in the 1960s at international level, there was little appetite for Community activity in the environmental field, as the institutions and Member States alike were immersed in the task of defining the Community legal and political order in this period. Nonetheless, a small amount of Community legislation was adopted in these years on what would now be considered to be environmental matters. In this period, and up to the entry into force of the Single European Act in 1987, two legal bases were used for such legislation, each requiring unanimity of voting in the Council. The first was Article 100 (now, in amended form, Article 115 TFEU). The second was Article 235 (now, in amended form, Article 352 TFEU).

Summary

This book was conceived of some five years ago, with the aim of providing a user-friendly, comprehensive and contextual account of an area of law which could not be more critically important, but which is often discounted as technical and dense. Our objective, therefore, was to communicate this vital area of law in a way that was comprehensible, without losing too many of its nuances or ignoring fundamental complexities.

One of the challenges of this field is, of course, its fast-moving nature. Since we first started this book, a great many events have intervened which are of tremendous significance to this area. Some of these have been specifically environmental developments, such as the conclusion of the Paris Agreement at the COP 21 United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2015 (see Chapter 8), the conclusion of the EU's Seventh Environmental Action Programme in 2013 (see Chapter 2), the continued rise in prominence of the Aarhus Convention on Access to Environmental Information, Public Participation and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, including in the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (see Chapters 5 and 7). Other developments have not been environment-specific, but have nevertheless had momentous effects on European environmental law and policy, including the entry into office of the Juncker Commission in 2014, bringing with it different political priorities (see Chapter 2); the ongoing Regulatory Fitness and Performance programme (REFIT) of the European Commission, which has included review of the Habitats and Birds Directives (see Chapters 4 and 12); and, of course, the EU's response to the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the subsequent European sovereign debt crisis, which has seen an overwhelming pressure to prioritise economic goals (jobs and growth) and economic governance (see Chapters 1, 3 and 6). The most recent such momentous development has been the June 2016 vote of almost 52 per cent of the British people to ‘Brexit’, the implications of which – including for the effective protection of the environment in the UK and EU – will certainly be profound, but are as yet unclear.

The title of the book reflects the fact that it aims to cover not only EU environmental law, but also the increasing body of European environmental law that does not originate in the EU, including the law of the ECHR and the Aarhus Convention.

Summary

The increasing involvement of private and civil society actors in European environmental governance is a constant theme of this book. As discussed there, European environmental governance has become a classic instance of what is often termed ‘networked’ governance, whereby centralised bodies ‘have become increasingly dependent upon the cooperation and joint resource mobilization of policy actors outside their hierarchical control’. This chapter considers the extent to which private actors play a role in the enforcement of EU environmental law, as a counterpart to the public enforcement of EU environmental law by the European Commission and Member State national authorities discussed in Chapter 6.

Private Enforcement of EU Environmental Law at National Level

Direct Effect of EU Environmental Law

Overview

The force of international law in a given national legal system is, according to traditional conceptions, decided upon according to the principles of that legal system. Certain States may choose to adopt the position that international law effectively forms part of the same legal system as domestic law, such that norms passed at international level which the State is bound by may also be relied upon directly before national courts (an approach typically known as the ‘monist’ approach to international law). Other States may choose to view the domestic legal system and international legal system as distinct, such that international norms – even those ratified by the State in question – only become part of the domestic legal system if a domestic law is passed transposing or incorporating that norm which achieves this (an approach typically known as the ‘dualist’ approach to international law).

The CJEU, however, has since the outset famously developed its own constitutional principles governing the force which, in its view, must be accorded to (what is now) EU law within national legal orders. In its seminal 1964 judgment in Costa v. ENEL, the CJEU established the principle of supremacy of EU law over national law, meaning that, in the event of a conflict between a provision of national law and a provision of EU law, a national court must give precedence to the latter.

Summary

EU Waste Policy

EU waste policy occupies an important place within the Union's environmental portfolio. This may be explained by the continuous rise of waste, which amounts, on average, to the disposal of half a tonne of household rubbish every year, per individual. According to the European Environment Agency, ‘the largest waste streams in Europe originate from construction and demolition, mining and quarrying, along with manufacturing activities’. Though landfill used to be a traditional method of waste disposal, this is not sustainable in the long term as the primary source of waste disposal. Thus, the EU is continuously improving its waste management approach, which is now embodied in the waste hierarchy, with waste prevention as the preferred option. However, it is not only waste management that is central to the EU waste policy. Even more important is the fact that waste, due to its physical characteristics or method of disposal, represents a major source of pollution. As a result of economic and technological development we are facing different types of waste which require prevention to avoid adverse environmental or human health impacts. Yet, waste should not only be associated with environmental pollution but should be recognised as a valuable resource. The EU recognises its economic potential that may lead to wider economic and social benefits. One illustrative example is recycling as one waste management option which may boost employment, generate economic growth and foster innovation and a knowledge-based economy.

Waste policy has a long lineage in the EU, starting from the Commission's 1972 Communication on the EC Programme on Environment, where the focus was on reduction of waste generation and recycling. Soon after, the Directive on waste oils and the Directive on waste were adopted in 1975, which paved the way for considerable legislative activism in this policy area. The Directive on waste provided for the first time an appropriate legal framework for implementing EC waste policy. Although the essential objective of waste disposal was the protection of human health and the environment against any harmful effects, the preamble of the directive seemed to focus more on the need to regulate waste to avoid any distortion of competition in the common market. Still, the Directive set out a definition of waste and introduced the waste hierarchy and polluter pays principles.

Summary

Introduction

The European Union is a region historically rich in biodiversity and wildlife. However, this richness is under severe threat. The combined forces of (agro)industrialisation, urban sprawl, human mobility, climate change, consumerism and other environmental stress factors conspire against green spaces, forests, wetlands, breeding grounds, self-sustaining ecosystems and the species that populate them. This chapter investigates the contribution of EU law as an instrument to halt and reverse the decline of nature and biodiversity in Europe. The discussion focuses on the two most prominent instruments in the EU's legal arsenal: the Birds Directive and the Habitats Directive. Additional measures, including the Regulation on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES Regulation) and the more recent Regulation on Alien Invasive Species (AIS Regulation) are flagged up in the final section but their analysis is outside the remit of this chapter.

The existence of a well-developed body of EU law on nature conservation and biodiversity may, at first sight, appear difficult to reconcile with subsidiarity and the doctrine of conferred competences. This is all the more so when we consider that the first piece of landmark legislation, the Birds Directive, was adopted well before the European Union acquired environmental policy competence in the Single European Act. The protection of nature and wildlife is intimately connected with decision-making on land use, development and the governance of property rights, which are all issues that are traditionally perceived as politically sensitive and therefore deeply domestic. Indeed, many considered that the focus on migratory (and therefore border-crossing) birds in the 1979 Birds Directive was but a thinly veiled justification for a major EU institutional over-reach. Ultimately, the Directive has stood the test of time and, together with its younger sister Directive on the conservation of habitats, it is now much more solidly grounded in the Treaty's environmental protection provisions of Article 191 TFEU. A stronger awareness of the transnational interdependence of ecosystems has also helped to allay concerns about competence creep. A growing consensus now exists that uncoordinated national nature and biodiversity protection initiatives are highly unlikely to be effective in the fight against nature and biodiversity decline.

Summary

Introduction: The EU's Changing Regulatory Toolbox

The techniques that the EU uses to regulate for environmental issues have changed dramatically over the past 40 years. For around the first 20 years of its existence, Community environmental policy relied almost exclusively on what we might call ‘traditional’ regulatory techniques, relying primarily on hierarchical proscriptions by lawmakers (e.g. the imposition of environmental standards, or the banning of environmental hazardous substances) to be enforced by public authorities (e.g. agencies or courts).

These techniques, often called ‘hierarchical’, ‘direct’ or ‘command-and-control’ regulation, were supplemented in the 1990s by an increasing reliance upon market mechanisms to achieve environmental aims. Such ‘market-based’ instruments, such as emissions trading and environmental taxes and charges, now play a vital role in the EU's regulatory mix. At its heart, this change reflects the ideological shift that had taken place under Reagan in the USA, and Thatcher in the UK, towards neo-liberalism and belief that free-market values should apply throughout not only economic, but also social, political and environmental life. While traditional direct regulation remains important within the EU, the use of market-based instruments is being considered in increasingly wide areas of EU environmental policy, including areas such as habitat conservation where it was formerly thought inappropriate.

A third important part of the regulatory mix in contemporary EU environmental policy is the increasing use of instruments aimed at encouraging individuals and organisations (voluntarily) to get involved in achieving the EU's environmental policy goals. These instruments may be viewed as forming part of the development of ‘network-based’ governance, i.e. reliance on non-hierarchical, societal-driven methods of achieving policy aims. In the case of corporations, one example is the emphasis on ‘corporate social responsibility’, a trend generally embraced by the EU and Member State governments, but regarded with deep suspicion by some environmentalists. More broadly, the emphasis on improving environmental governance in Europe, in particular by means of the principles of access to information, participation and access to justice in environmental matters, provided for in the Aarhus Convention of 1998, can also be viewed as part of the effort to get non-governmental individuals and organisations involved in environmental protection.

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Cross-cultural validation of the revised Green et al., paranoid thoughts scale

Empowering Through Law: Environmental NGOs as Regulatory Intermediaries in EU Nature Governance

Pandemic paranoia in the general population: international prevalence and sociodemographic profile

European Environmental Law

Contents

List of Cases

6 - Public Enforcement of EU Environmental Law

Summary

9 - Air Pollution and Industrial Emissions

Summary

13 - Technological Risk Regulation: Chemicals, Genetically Modified Organisms and Nanotechnology

Summary

8 - Climate Change

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2 - Actors and Instruments

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Frontmatter

1 - The Foundations of EU Environmental Law: History, Aims and Context

Summary

List of Tables

Preface and Acknowledgements

Summary

7 - Private Enforcement of EU Environmental Law

Summary

14 - Waste

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12 - Nature and Biodiversity Protection

Summary

4 - Techniques of Regulating the Environment

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Dedication

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European Environmental Law

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