Regulating Global Climate Change

From Common Concern to Planetary Concern
For some years now, growing scientific warnings have continued to strengthen the belief that an unprecedented global warming is underway, and that only an urgent system-wide transformation can avoid climate disaster. In his June 2, 2022 address to the Stockholm+50 Conference, the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres construed “climate emergency” as one of the key drivers of the “triple planetary crisis”. Despite this, the overriding impression left by COP27, held in Sharm el-Sheikh in November 2022, was of a divided institution, floundering and nowhere close to realizing its stated aim of “stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that would prevent dangerous interference with the climate system”. While prognoses and projections set the stage for a climate change emergency, the legally ordained platform for institutionalized cooperation to deal with the problem seems to be achieving too little too late.

This book presents articles from the special climate change issue of the journal Environmental Policy and Law (vol. 52 (5-6), 2022), published to mark the 30th year of the UNFCCC. The contributions included here seek to make sense of the marathon climate-change regulatory process. The book is organized into 5 parts: climate normativity; regime at the crossroads; climate justice; factoring gender; and the Paris conundrum.

Envisioning Our Environmental Future

Stockholm+50 and Beyond
With the Stockholm+50 Conference, held on 2–3 June 2022, the global movement to protect the environment has reached a 50 year milestone. The first UN Conference on the Human Environment, also held in Stockholm, from 5–16 June 1972, proved to be the watershed in addressing this problem, and as the world assembles once more in the Swedish capital it is time to think aloud and look ahead. In his address in 1972, the then Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme said: “The decisive question is in which direction we will develop… there is no individual future, neither for people nor for nations.” The only other head of government to attend in 1972, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, highlighted the development as “one of the primary means of improving the environment of living, of providing food, water, sanitation and shelter, of making the deserts green and mountains habitable” and drew attention to the wisdom of the Atharva Veda: “What of thee I dig out; Let that quickly grow over; Let me not hit thy vitals or thy heart."

The content of this book probes global environmental regulatory approaches and institutional effectiveness, and explores cutting-edge ideational solutions for our shared triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. The 22 contributions are organized in three parts: Testing Times; Global Ideas; and Sectoral Ideas and have been collated from the Environmental Policy and Law special section entitled Stockholm+50 and Beyond.

Our Earth Matters

Pathways to a Better Common Environmental Future
On May 19 2021 it was officially 3 years since it was recognized that we are now living in the Anthropocene, Earth’s latest geological epoch, named for the “unmistakable imprint of human activities.” This announcement came almost 60 years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s landmark work of environmental writing in the book Silent Spring and, in 2022, it will be 50 years since the first UN Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in June 1972 (read more here). Now, therefore, it is an opportune time to probe the future trajectory for our better common environmental future.

This book presents articles – which are also co-published in the EPL special issue – by 21 experts and scholars that examine existing global regulatory approaches, processes, instruments and institutions for the protection of the global environment. The articles are grouped in four sections: Prognoses, Processes, Problematique, and Prospects, and in them the authors have sought to explore answers to the existential environmental crisis. They urge us to ponder our reckless destruction of natural spaces, endangering of plant and animal species, poisoning of the environment, and general disturbance of our essential ecological processes.

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