In light of the accelerating nature of climate change and its effect, it is unsurprising that various entities increasingly resort to courts and tribunals to seek to address the many harms and wrongs that clearly stem from climate change. This article discusses the opportunities in this context for those who face displacement by the effects of climate change, an issue that is not necessarily at the heart of either climate justice debates or climate displacement debates. Discussions about how to respond to displacement arising in the context of climate change often focus on the ‘protection space’ or ‘assistance space’, in which those affected are conceptualized as actual or potential seekers of protection or assistance, who may or may not be owed refuge elsewhere on account of unmet needs for shelter, support or safety. This article takes a different approach and conceptualizes those affected as potential or actual seekers of justice, who may be owed rectification for inflicted harm. The article thus contributes to emerging scholarship concerning climate change litigation and climate harm reversal, by focusing on the corrective justice potential for those who face the specific issue of displacement stemming from climate change. To this end, the article provides the relevant practical and analytical background, and discusses key recent law and policy developments in both the domestic and cross-border spheres. The article considers not merely the nexus between displacement stemming from climate change and considerations of justice, but also how and where justice in this context is or may be sought.

Infrastructure is often viewed through global and promotional lenses, particularly its role in creating market connectivity. However, infrastructure is heavily dependent on and constitutive of local spaces, where ‘frictions’, or disputes, emerge. Drawing on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a case study, we examine in detail two cases of BRI-related climate change litigation – one in Pakistan, and one in Kenya – that shed light on the frictions arising from what is deemed the most significant transnational infrastructure project of our time. In doing so, this study demonstrates how infrastructure can be made more visible in environmental law and how environmental law itself provides an important mechanism for stabilizing friction in the places where infrastructure is located.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is conventionally understood as voluntary and market- based corporate behaviour without direct government involvement. The development of CSR in China challenges this understanding in the light of the growing role of government in promoting it. Over the past decade China has demonstrated a state-centric approach towards promoting CSR. Existing studies focus only on Chinese domestic CSR practices. However, with the rise of Chinese companies in Africa under China's ‘Belt and Road Initiative’, it is important to examine how the state-centric approach applies to the overseas CSR practice of Chinese companies. This article aims to fill the literature gap through in-depth interviews and analysis of the Standard Gauge Railway project in Kenya. It shows that close institutional, relational, and bureaucratic ties between the state and the business community give the Chinese government the power to influence the behaviour of Chinese state-owned enterprises overseas. The Chinese government can influence the CSR practices of Chinese companies overseas through mandating, facilitating, endorsing and partnering in order to minimize the negative externalities of companies’ overseas activities. However, the state-centric CSR approach limits the space for civil society engagement and the effectiveness of the approach abroad is constrained by a variety of institutional contexts and corporate ownership models.

‘Communities’ – whether local, regional, or transnational – can provide an essential force in the protection of our global underwater cultural heritage (UCH). As an issue of low political concern, with its protection vulnerable to externalities and compliance weaknesses, UCH forms an ideal test case for exploring governance solutions without reliance on the state. It is also an area where communities are increasingly integrated within governance models. This article examines the theoretical justification for reducing reliance on top-down laws to protect natural and cultural heritage, exploring Ostromian arguments for greater community self- and co-regulation. Using this theoretical framework, it highlights numerous advantages of community-oriented governance in the management of a complex global concern, such as UCH protection, and underscores the role and importance of the appropriate design of meta-regulation in steering communities towards wider public objectives. The article also identifies where communities or ‘networks’ have provided important additional protection for UCH, and discusses further policy mechanisms – such as community buy-in, incentivization, and self-regulation – which could help to facilitate community-led governance in the future.

The purpose of this article is to explore the normative nature of the Ecosystem Approach in international environmental law. To do so, the article examines the implementation of this approach in two Mediterranean regimes: the Barcelona Convention and the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean. As these two regimes have implemented the Ecosystem Approach by taking into account the experiences of other international regimes, they are representative of broader trends in relation to this concept. The examination reveals that the Ecosystem Approach operates as an interstitial principle: a norm that fulfils the functions of a principle with regard to other rules, but is devoid of normative autonomy. This understanding of the Ecosystem Approach brings clarity to a concept that is ambiguous yet is widely disseminated in environmental governance. It may also further the progressive emergence of the Ecosystem Approach as a general principle of international environmental law.

Sites of ancient woodland in the United Kingdom (UK) are diminishing rapidly and the multifunctional forest management system with its fragmented approach fails effectively to protect such woodland. In the face of reports on the destruction of ancient woodland, the HS2 High-Speed train project in the UK signifies the extent of trade-offs among the key stakeholders. Such large infrastructure projects typically come with high environmental and social costs, including deforestation, habitat fragmentation, biodiversity loss, and social disruption. This article examines the protection of ancient woodland in the UK and assesses the challenges in applying the ecosystem approach, an internationally recognized sustainability strategy, in the context of such protection. A better understanding of the ecosystem approach to manage ancient woodland is critical for promoting sustainable forestry practices in the UK and informs the discussion in this article of the importance of conserving ancient woodland globally. Lessons learned from UK woodland policies and certification schemes include the need to have in place strong regulatory frameworks, introduce clear indicators, and recognize pluralistic value systems alongside economic considerations. The article concludes that the protection of ancient woodland in the UK requires distinct and strong laws that reflect multiple values of this resource, acknowledge the trade-offs among stakeholders, and adopt an inclusive approach to reduce power asymmetries.

This article examines ‘essential use’ as a novel form of regulatory control. An essential use approach to the regulation of potentially hazardous chemicals has not been used extensively (if at all) in European Union (EU) regulatory law and warrants further consideration. Essential use, as initially proposed by scientists and later referred to in the EU 2020 Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability, is a radical departure from the current method of regulating hazardous substances. The purpose of this article is to contribute to legal scholarship on essential use by (i) scoping its origins in United States law and subsequently in international law; (ii) noting its limited incorporation into the EU legal order over the past 30 years; (iii) analyzing how it could be further incorporated into the EU legal order; and (iv) considering the impact of such a move on the future regulation of hazardous substances in the EU.