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.

There are two general pathways towards climate change litigation in China: tort-based litigation to hold carbon emitters accountable in civil law, and administrative litigation against the government to demand better climate regulation. While the first pathway is gaining momentum among Chinese scholars, this article argues that legal barriers to applying tort-based rules to climate change should be fairly acknowledged. The article argues that China's legal framework for environmental impact assessment (EIA) provides more openness and flexibility for the resolution of climate change disputes. Therefore, EIA-based climate lawsuits, which challenge environmental authorities for not adequately taking climate change factors into account in decision-making processes, encounter relatively fewer legal barriers, require less radical legal or institutional reform, and have greater potential to maintain existing legal orders. The regulatory effects produced by EIA-based litigation suggest that the scholarship on climate change litigation in China should take such litigation seriously because it could influence both governments and emitters in undertaking more proactive efforts. This China-based study, with a special focus on judicial practice in the largest developing country, will shine a light on China's contribution to transnational climate litigation.

The law and regulation of the energy sector in Australia is subject to overlapping responsibilities of both federal and state governments. Crucially for energy transition efforts, neither energy, environment nor climate is mentioned in the Australian Constitution. Australia has a tradition of creative cooperative federalism solutions for responding to problems of national importance. In the energy sector this has resulted in an intricate national framework for energy markets, which relies on mirror legislation passed by participating states, with oversight by state and federal executive governments. Independently of these frameworks, both federal and state governments have passed climate change legislation, which crucially includes renewable energy support mechanisms. At a time when a rapid transition to a decarbonized energy system is essential, legal frameworks struggle to respond in a timely fashion. The political discourse around energy has become increasingly toxic – reflecting a dysfunctional state–federal relationship in energy and climate law. Australia needs to consider whether its cooperative federalism solutions are sufficient to support the energy transition and how climate law at the state and federal levels interacts with energy market legal frameworks.

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.

Environmental public interest litigation (EPIL) by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) emerged in China over the last decade amidst the growing focus on environmental issues and the increasing political need to bring greater public participation to the area. This article examines the current practice of EPIL by NGOs in order to understand the potential flaws and deficiencies of NGO participation in this relatively new field of environmental litigation. The article sets out by exploring EPIL as a legal pathway for the public to become involved in China's environmental governance. It then analyzes the legal provision of environmental litigation in China before critically examining several instances of EPIL initiated by NGOs between 2015 and 2019. The article finds that NGOs show weaknesses in their current EPIL practice, including in case selection and litigation risk assessment, but are willing to test and potentially expand the scope of EPIL into new areas of environmental protection such as noise pollution and renewable energy. It concludes that these weaknesses and strengths of NGO involvement in EPIL reflect the constantly evolving landscape of environmental governance and environmental litigation in China.

The traditional concern of federalism literature has been both descriptive and prescriptive. How do federalist systems allocate powers among central, regional, and even local governments? How can these powers be divided in a manner that allows for unity and diversity in policymaking and law? These questions are given greater pertinence by the seriousness of climate change and the need for a just transition to lower-carbon economies. Classical federalism, public choice theory, and dynamic energy federalism all have something to offer in the field of clean energy federalism. This article situates the ‘functional federalism’ that arises from South Africa's multi-sphere system of government within these debates. The article explains the system of functional federalism in South Africa and details the tripartite structure (physical, market, and regulatory) of the South African electricity sector. By delineating the complex interactions that have unfolded between governmental and non-governmental actors in the electricity sector in recent times, the article demonstrates that the South African case will be of continuing interest to scholars of federalism.

Federalism is ostensibly misplaced to mitigate climate change as a global public concern as it is prone to import the inadequate incentive structures existing at the international level into the domestic domain. Drawing from the legal structures and procedures of Swiss federalism, this article attempts to provide a more nuanced assessment of the relationship between laws designed to mitigate climate change and federalism. It seeks to demonstrate that federalism may support effective policies to mitigate climate change, provided that the architecture of domestic climate change law meets certain criteria. These include considerable federal powers, a degree of institutional flexibility, robust formal channels of influence for subnational actors on policy formulation at the federal level, ample room for regulatory experimentalism at the lower layers of federalism, and the ‘right to act’ conferred on the Federation to avoid political impasse among the constituent units.

‘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.

A study of the rights regime for environmental protection in India indicates that such protections overlap with constitutional rights guaranteed primarily to citizens or persons under the law. Contemporary jurisprudence has aggressively developed this intersectionality, declaring natural entities to be living persons with fundamental rights analogous to those of human beings. This article explores the role played by two judgments delivered by the Uttarakhand High Court – Mohammed Salim v. State of Uttarakhand and Lalit Miglani v. State of Uttarakhand – in the establishment of an effective framework for environmental protection. This is effectuated in both cases by assigning legal personality to rivers and articulating a conceptual shift from the human-centric approach. Accounting for the socio-cultural and spiritual relationships that have received legal protection, this article critically analyzes the judgments, their rationale and contributions to environmental protection. As the judgments articulate a paradigm shift in environmental protection, their effectiveness is best assessed through analyzing the frameworks created for their implementation. While the pronouncement of the Indian courts on the legal personality of rivers is an encouraging paradigm shift in environmental commitment, establishing the rights of nature was undertaken without due attention to the complexities that characterize the Indian socio-politico-religious context and to the legal consequences of bestowing vaguely contoured rights upon natural entities.

The Federal Republic of Germany and the United States (US) have adopted different models for energy federalism. Germany allocates more authority to the federal government and the US relies on a decentralized cooperative federalism model that preserves key roles for state actors. This article explores and compares the relevance of federal legal structures for renewable energy expansion in both countries. It sets out the constitutional, statutory, and factual foundations in both Germany and the US, and explores the legal and empirical dimensions of renewable energy expansion at the federal and state levels. The article concludes by drawing several comparative lessons about the significance of federal structures for energy transition processes.

While the intergovernmental climate regime increasingly recognizes the role of non-state actors in achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement (PA), the normative linkages between the intergovernmental climate regime and the non-state dominated ‘transnational partnership governance’ remain vague and tentative. A formalized engagement of the intergovernmental climate regime with transnational partnerships can increase the effectiveness of partnerships in delivering on climate mitigation and adaptation, thereby complementing rather than replacing government action. The proposed active engagement with partnerships would include (i) collecting and analyzing information to develop and prioritize areas for transnational and partnership engagement; (ii) defining minimum criteria and procedural requirements to be listed on an enhanced Non-state Actor Zone for Climate Action platform; (iii) actively supporting strategic initiatives; (iv) facilitating market or non-market finance as part of Article 6 PA; and (v) evaluating the effectiveness of partnerships in the context of the enhanced transparency framework (Article 13 PA) and the global stocktake (Article 14 PA). The UNFCCC Secretariat could facilitate engagement and problem solving by actively orchestrating transnational partnerships. Constructing effective implementation partnerships, recording their mitigation and adaptation goals, and holding them accountable may help to move climate talks from rhetoric to action.

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.

The United States (US) is frequently portrayed as a nation with a deep distrust of big government and a strong commitment to markets and competition. In contrast, the prevailing image of the European Union (EU) is that of a highly bureaucratized polity favouring interventionist economic governance over free market capitalism. In the context of clean energy, however, these roles appear to be somewhat reversed. A top-level survey of the US clean energy policy landscape reveals a surprisingly pervasive reliance on government subsidies with few, if any, competitive elements. EU clean energy policy, meanwhile, reflects an unexpected commitment to market-based instruments and competition. This article suggests that these counter-intuitive policy trends can be explained by critical differences in the black-letter law of both jurisdictions and its enforcement in the courts, among other factors. Unlike their American counterparts, EU judges prioritize the timely transition to a low-carbon energy economy over unrestricted competition among Member States. As the EU pushes for greater intrastate competition in clean energy policy, the US focuses instead on defending the Founding Fathers’ ideal of unfettered interstate competition.