Climate change mitigation calls for the limitation and reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across all sectors. However, limiting GHG emissions from aviation has proven to be problematic for technical reasons (e.g., lack of low-carbon alternatives) as well as legal reasons (e.g., international aviation does not readily fall within any one state's jurisdiction). Relevant initiatives have followed two streams. At the international level, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has adopted technical standards and, more recently, a market-based mechanism to limit emissions from international civil aviation. In parallel, states have adopted their own policies and measures to regulate emissions from both domestic and international aviation, ranging from tax and technical standards to traffic management and infrastructural development. While much of the literature on climate change mitigation in the aviation sector has focused on international efforts, this article reveals the importance of understanding the tensions and complementarities of the two streams.

Agricultural emissions in most countries have been increasing against a backdrop of decreasing non-agricultural emissions. The climate change treaties contain a qualification that appears to exempt the agricultural sector from mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions where there is a ‘threat to food production’. This potential mitigation exception gives rise to the risk that states will invoke a threat to food production in order to shield their agricultural sector from intensifying mitigation pressure. A systematic analysis of documentation issued pursuant to the climate treaties reveals that many states, both developed and developing, have made statements suggesting that their agricultural sector is relieved of some or all of the pressure placed on other economic sectors to deliver mitigation outcomes. However, this concern that mitigation of agricultural emissions will threaten food production is only weakly supported, even as it threatens achievement of the Paris Agreement's goal of keeping global warming ‘well below 2°C’.

Law – through regulation, criminalization and litigation – provides key mechanisms for mitigating the harmful effects of oil disasters. At the same time, these mechanisms also enable the perpetuation of oil disasters under an extractivist imperative. This disaster tolerance is the point of departure for this article's examination of the legal response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster over the last decade. Based on a methodology that combines a social harm approach with the political ecology of Felix Guattari, we firstly present a reconceptualization of harm inflicted by oil corporations across three registers: environment, society, and subjectivity. We subsequently introduce the concept of transversal harm, which allows us to move beyond the criminal and civil damage of corporate crime and negligence and to capture the collective and continuous impact of oil extractivism, as opposed to the exceptional impact of oil disasters. Transversal harm opens new avenues for assigning corporate responsibility and reducing disaster tolerance as the by-product of environmental law.

This article argues that an improved legal methodology is needed to ensure that states’ greenhouse gas emissions mitigation obligations are specified in line with best available science and the equity principle. In this vein, the article explores the extent to which the ‘meta-equity assessment’ of states’ emissions by the Climate Action Tracker (CAT) can contribute to this aim. The article finds that the CAT's PRIMAP Equity tool, embedded in the Potsdam Real-time Integrated Model for the probabilistic Assessment of emission Paths, offers the best available approach to distributing a global carbon budget among states in line with equity criteria recognized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The emissions data and global pathways used in the PRIMAP Equity tool can be updated. The major challenge ahead lies in understanding which of the emissions and temperature pathways can be applied in the legal context, and how.

This article traces the various legal incarnations of the intergenerational equity principle. Despite its silent proliferation in international and constitutional laws over the past five decades, the principle dwelled mostly at the margins of inquiry and practice. Recent efforts to counteract global warming have allowed intergenerational claims to gain new traction. Building on a comparison of ten climate-related lawsuits, I analyze the latest advances in the representation, conceptualization, and remediation of future generations’ interests. Against the backdrop of growing willingness to engage with intergenerational disputes, legal decision makers will need to confront two thorny challenges going forward. Firstly, evolving doctrines of extraterritoriality and legal subjecthood increasingly require the protective scope of the principle to extend to foreign citizens and non-human persons. Secondly, awareness of dispersed and interlocked long-term risks may trigger the application of intergenerational doctrines beyond a narrow environmental frame. Grappling with these challenges implicates larger reflections about the role of law in contriving our collective future.

Most modern-day environmental issues are caused by the complex aggregation and interaction of numerous actions contributing to large-scale problems, from biodiversity loss to climate change. Environmental impact assessments (EIAs) consider how projects contribute to these cumulative environmental problems. This article firstly evaluates the theoretical importance of cumulative effects concepts for EIA. It reveals their potential to spotlight values embedded in decision making and to illuminate, as a lighthouse would, types of harm from broad-ranging, typically unregulated, activities. A large-scale global survey of national EIA laws and multilateral environmental agreements then shows that cumulative effects concepts are legally relevant for most national EIA frameworks. This prevalence suggests that better implementation of cumulative effects provisions may help EIA law to deliver more significant benefits than previously appreciated. Evaluating a sample of EIA provisions shows that cumulative effects concepts can contribute to different stages of an EIA, but that using these concepts across all EIA stages would maximize their potential to achieve the theoretical benefits identified. From theoretical and practical legal perspectives, cumulative effects concepts have significant latent potential – perhaps transformational potential – to address cumulative environmental change through EIA regimes at national and international levels. However, without better implementation, the latent potential of these laws to address cumulative environmental problems is likely to remain unrealized. By shedding light on the extent of national and international legal frameworks that adopt cumulative effects concepts, and their differences, this article highlights the significant learning potential between legal regimes to aid improved implementation.

Since the Escazú Agreement entered into force in 2021, many have looked forward to the realization of its goal of further entrenching environmental democratic rights and enabling sustainable development in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region. The severe environmental and related human rights challenges in the region have caught global attention, and the Agreement is most timely in its pursuit of contributing to addressing the situation. This article assesses the quality of, and the extent to which, the right of the public to participate in environmental decision-making processes under the Escazú Agreement can enable the regime to achieve its goal, and how best this right might be strengthened where necessary. This assessment is executed within the context of local peculiarities of the LAC region and good practice in the field, as reflected in the Aarhus Convention and the UNEP Bali Guidelines. The study finds that while aspects of the participatory right regime in the Escazú Agreement are sound – and align with or go beyond existing good practice – some key provisions require improvement in order to increase the effectiveness of the Agreement.

A decision will soon have to be taken regarding the renewal of approval of glyphosate at the European Union (EU) level; this pesticidal active substance, however, is more controversial than ever. This article critically assesses various strategies pursued by EU Member States and regional authorities which challenge the EU approach to glyphosate and aim to safeguard their higher levels of public health and environmental protection. It reflects on the prospects of success of these strategies, and their compatibility with EU law. The analysis includes the action for the annulment of glyphosate's 2017 reapproval brought by the Brussels-Capital Region, the Austrian attempt to enact a blanket ban on glyphosate-based pesticidal formulations, and the more sophisticated strategies pursued by Luxembourg and France. The article concludes that the French strategy is effective in risk regulation terms, and compatible with EU law. Nonetheless, adopting the French approach may prove rather difficult for other Member States, as a result of both structural-regulatory and practical constraints. Rather, an EU-wide strategy on glyphosate is urgently needed.