This chapter reviews agricultural policy priorities of increased recent profile and the classification of and constraints on associated support within the Agreement on Agriculture. Many of the evolving priorities are environmental, concerning productivity growth (with implications for sustainability and other priorities), biosecurity, biodiversity, water management and climate change mitigation. The green box offers opportunity to address these priorities through unlimited support for general services and direct payments to producers. Several conceptual and definitional issues arise, including whether limiting payments in certain categories to the amount of losses, costs or income forgone is too restrictive to achieve socially-desired non-trade objectives. If considered too constraining additional provisions could be crafted in the green box. With climate change a predominant priority, making measures exemptible on a mitigation basis alone without requiring that they have at most minimal trade-distorting effects or effects on production might be seen as a way forward.

To comply with its human rights obligations, how much does an individual state have to do reduce greenhouse gas emissions within its jurisdiction and by when? And what are the criteria by which a tribunal can objectively assess the adequacy of a state’s efforts to reduce emissions? This chapter proposes five tests, building on the practice of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR), for such an assessment. First, has every feasible human rights-consistent step been taken by the state to reduce emissions? Second, is the state subsidizing emissions, disproportionately allocating resources to spending that does not benefit the public, or failing to take adequate steps to mobilize resources towards emissions reduction? Third, is the climate plan reasonably ambitious in comparison to peer states at comparable levels of development? Fourth, has there been a progressive increase in ambition and avoidance of any retrogression? Fifth, are the state’s plans to reduce emissions in line with limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5°C? A sixth test addresses the “how” question, rather than “how much or how fast”: is the manner in which emissions are being limited consistent with human rights standards?

In September 2020, six Portuguese children and young adults filed a climate change case with the European Court of Human Rights (‘ECtHR’) against thirty-three European states, comprising Europe’s major emitters. This chapter outlines the basis on which they argue that these states are violating their rights under the European Convention on Human Rights (‘ECHR’) by failing to adopt the radical measures required to safeguard their futures. In particular, it outlines how principles of shared state responsibility are invoked alongside a related general principle of law applicable in situations involving causal uncertainty and multiple wrongdoers to address the ambiguity surrounding the extent of states’ respective ‘fair shares’ of the necessary global mitigation effort. These principles are relied upon to reinforce the paramountcy of the need to achieve the 1.5°C target of the Paris Agreement to realize the rights of the youth-applicants. That various core principles of ECHR jurisprudence, including the margin of appreciation and the principle of effectiveness, support this view is further outlined. The chapter also outlines, with reference to the landmark Urgenda decision, how the approach taken by the youth-applicants in this case can reinforce the efforts of domestic climate change litigators in Europe and beyond.

This chapter engages with the complexities of Anthropocene politics and ecologies in Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Home to the densest concentration of wind turbines anywhere on earth, the Isthmus is a key site for climate change mitigation, but not without controversy. Working from the viewpoint of cultural anthropology, we show how local Indigenous and mestizo communities are contending with the massive transformation of their lands and livelihoods. We ask a central question for Anthropocenic times: what are the political forces that shape the possibilities for low carbon futures? Who sets the agenda for transitions and who—human and otherwise—is affected by enormous infrastructural shifts in energy systems? In this chapter, we show how various forces—political, economic and cultural—operate along with the wind itself to shape local futures in both positive and negative ways. We pay special attention to Indigenous philosophies and experiences because they help us see better possibilities at the nexus of energy, environment and human thriving.

Without progress on mitigation, the costs of adaptation to climate change will become prohibitive. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates the cost of adaptation in the water sector alone could exceed USD 50 billion/annum as droughts become more intense and frequent as well as causing more severe rainstorms, flooding and cyclones, and increasing water scarcity in cities. Climate change also risks melting glaciers and snow, upon which over 2 billion people depend for part of their water. Many urban water systems have been built without adequately factoring in the risks of climate change. These risks are already impacting cities: extreme droughts, or sewer systems overwhelmed by storms, sending raw sewage into streets, rivers and drinking water. Declining water availability risks higher energy and carbon intensity of water. This chapter gives a number of climate change mitigation strategies that also yield significant climate adaptation co-benefits and explores how pursuing these strategies can help improve sustainable development goals of improved productivity, public health, new jobs in water/energy efficiency functions and better social equity outcomes.

Individuals did not choose the transition to ultrasociality or its incarnation as the global market economy. The current configuration of global human society is the result of the mechanical forces of Darwinian natural selection working on groups. Avoiding environmental and social disasters requires actively reasserting human agency over the ultrasocial system. The first step is to curb the excesses of the global market economy. Minimal policies to temporarily stabilize the system would ensure the well-being of all individuals and protect the natural world we depend on. Environmental policies at a minimum should stabilize the level of atmospheric CO2 to prevent catastrophic climate change and greatly expand and protect the Earth’s nonhuman life forms by expanding wild areas. Minimal social policies include universal health care, universal education, establishing a minimum and maximum income, and ensuring old age security. But these policies are only a first step in a transition to a sustainable evolutionary path.

To catalyse action for both mitigation and adaptation to anthropogenic climate change, improved understanding of synergies and trade-offs induced by differential governance interventions in earth system dynamics is needed at multiple scales – local to national and global. This chapter applies a social-ecological systems (SES) analytical approach and a novel interdisciplinary integrative framework for trade-off analysis embedded within an SES approach to analyse cross-scale impacts of three specific UNFCCC-mediated policy mechanisms aimed at mitigation and/or adaptation to climate change:Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), the Clean Development Mechanism, and the Adaptation Fund. Evidence from published studies is presented to identify synergies and trade-offs among mitigation and adaptation impacts of these policy mechanisms. It is argued that the SES approach may provide a scalable, replicable, and integrative analytical approach to rigorously analyse the synergies and trade-offs of different global to local policy mechanisms and their feedback effects from local to global scales.

This chapter debates whether litigation is a meaningful way to attack the problem of climate change mitigation. For the proponents of climate litigation, who side is taken by Cinnamon Piñon Carlarne, their action has the potential to ensure that states take more ambitious action than they would have taken otherwise. But the argument developed on this side is even stronger, namely that the courts have a positive duty to take decisions in support of mitigation of emissions. Guy Dwyer, for the sceptics, contends that litigation is the least promising way to go about addressing climate change mitigation because several unavoidable hurdles that face pro-climate litigants all but guarantee their defeat. Indeed, Dwyer argues, the number of cases that might have caused emissions to be reduced can be counted on half of one hand.

This chapter debates whether litigation is a meaningful way to attack the problem of climate change mitigation. For the proponents of climate litigation, who side is taken by Cinnamon Piñon Carlarne, their action has the potential to ensure that states take more ambitious action than they would have taken otherwise. But the argument developed on this side is even stronger, namely that the courts have a positive duty to take decisions in support of mitigation of emissions. Guy Dwyer, for the sceptics, contends that litigation is the least promising way to go about addressing climate change mitigation because several unavoidable hurdles that face pro-climate litigants all but guarantee their defeat. Indeed, Dwyer argues, the number of cases that might have caused emissions to be reduced can be counted on half of one hand.