18. Climate Change Law

This chapter examines the fast-moving area of law relating to climate change. This includes a considerable body of public international law, from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to the legally innovative Paris Agreement 2015. The chapter also considers legal developments at the EU and UK levels, which both contain a rich body of climate law and policy. The EU and the UK are both seen as ‘world leaders’ in climate law and policy. In EU law, this is due to the EU greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme and the EU’s leadership in advocating ambitious greenhouse gas mitigation targets and in implementing these targets flexibly across the EU Member States through a range of regulatory mechanisms. The UK introduced path-breaking climate legislation in the Climate Change Act 2008, which provided an inspiring model of climate governance, legally entrenching long-term planning for both mitigation and adaptation. The chapter concludes with an exploration of climate litigation, a new and growing field of inquiry.

15. Water Pollution

This chapter critically examines English, as well as selected European Union, laws that regulate the interlinked environmental challenges of protecting the quality and quantity of water courses. It deals with legal rules seeking to prevent and limit the pollution of rivers and other inland surface waters, such as lakes, as well as coastal areas and groundwater. One of the key challenges for water pollution law is to evolve into a more holistic, coherent, and integrated pollution control regime. In discussing this challenge, the chapter refers to and critiques recent interesting attempts to develop environmental policy discourses of bioregionalism and ecofederalism, that is, attempts to map regulatory space onto ‘natural’ spaces.

12. International Environmental Law

While not the focus of this textbook, understanding the role and nature of international environmental law is important in understanding UK environmental law. This is because, international law has played a vital role in creating frameworks for environmental protection and for catalysing developments in national environmental law. This chapter provides an overview of international environmental law. It begins with a brief examination of the concept of international environmental law, the different ways it can be defined, its history, and the emergence of hybrids of it. In the second section a number of key ideas in public international law that are relevant to international environmental law are explored including the sources of international law, state sovreignity, fragmentation, and international law theory. The analysis then moves on to the institutional landscape of international environmental law, its legal nature and finally the nuanced relationship between international environmental law and national and EU law.

9. Regulatory Strategy

This chapter discusses the meaning and role of regulatory strategy in English and EU environmental law. Regulatory strategy is often thought of as an instrument to achieve certain environmental protection ends but the chapter argues that, despite the availability of a plethora of regulatory tools to implement them, regulators often face significant challenges to act in a strategic manner and to turn environmental regulatory strategy into an effective instrument of behavioural change. Against this background the chapter outlines the strengths and weaknesses of the key regulatory strategies currently adopted by both public and private regulators in a range of jurisdictions.

8. Principle and Policy

This chapter concerns two key concepts of environmental law: environmental principles and environmental policy. Both concepts are well known to those who study and practise UK and EU law, but that familiarity can be deceiving when it comes to understanding their role in environmental law, because both principles and policy perform important, distinctive, and evolving functions. Environmental principles are highly symbolic ideas of environmental policy that have been developing prominent roles in environmental law globally, including in EU environmental law. Environmental policy is often implicated in environmental law regimes because of the need to respond quickly to changing circumstances and provide detailed and technical guidance in complex policy areas. Determining the legal implications of extensive reliance on policy in environmental law is thus important. Exploring both these distinctive legal features of environmental law—principle and policy—helps to elucidate different aspects of environmental law as a subject, interrogating the jurisprudential nature of environmental law and revealing key characteristics of its developing doctrine.

4. Public Law

This chapter explains the important role that public law, particularly administrative law, plays in environmental law. This role comes about because much of environmental law requires vesting decision-making and regulatory power in the hands of public decision-makers at all levels of government. This chapter begins by providing an overview of the different constituent elements of public law: constitutional law, administrative law, the role of the EU and international law, as well the complexities of this area of law. The chapter then moves on to consider the way in which the different types of interests involved in environmental problems and the need for information and expertise provide challenges for public law. The chapter then provides an overview of four major features of public law that are particularly relevant to environmental lawyers: the Aarhus Convention, accountability mechanisms, judicial review, and human rights.

17. Air Quality Law

This chapter examines legal regimes relating to air quality, considering developments at the international, EU, UK and local levels. International and EU law is particularly important in this regulatory sphere since air pollution is a transboundary issue. There is also increasing public concern about air quality, which is reflected in high profile public interest litigation being brought against the UK government to ensure lawful levels of air quality are being met, or at least properly planned for. There are also implementation and coordination problems that make compliance with air quality law a considerable challenge. Regulating air quality ultimately requires coordinating the actions and efforts of actors in many industries, sectors, and geographical areas. At present, not all of those actors are within the scope of UK air quality law.

20. Environmental Assessment

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) and other related forms of assessment require decision-makers to take into account the environmental implications of an activity before making a decision about those acitvities. EIA is a feature of most environmental law systems of the world. This chapter is an overview of the Environmental impact assessment (EIA) and strategic environmental assessment (SEA) legal regimes in the EU and how they have been implemented into English law. It provides an overview of the distinctive legal nature of both EIA and SEA, the main legal features of each directive, and how they have been implemented into national law. A significant feature of this chapter is that it provides an overview of the case law of the CJEU and UK courts concerninig these regimes.

19. Planning Law

Planning law regulates development. Given that environmental problems are often caused by development, planning law has an important role to play in environmental law. With that said, planning law is a vast subject. This chapter provides a basic introduction to planning law and its relationship to environmental law. Its objective is to ensure students have a robust understanding of how planning law works. It begins with a brief overview of the history of planning law, its major themes, and provides a map of the main legal frameworks in planning. It then considers the role of planning policy, the development application process, and the relevance of a range of environmental issues in that process.

16. Waste Regulation

This chapter focuses on waste regulation and how the notion of ‘waste’, which can give rise to serious environmental and health problems, is a legally constructed one. Unlike other pollution control regimes, waste regulation is focused on an identified pollution source, which is defined and characterized in legal terms. The chapter shows how difficult it can be to make the legal distinction between waste and non-waste. In regulating waste, there is a fundamental tension between minimizing the polluting impacts of waste (making waste a firm focus for regulation), and encouraging secondary markets that promote discarded material as a resource rather than a potential pollution problem (where ‘waste’ can be a poor characterization of material). Legal disputes over the definition of waste and how waste should be regulated are grappling with this policy tension in an increasingly circular economy for natural resources.