Environmental Law For Transitions To Sustainability

This book presents inspiring ideas about how law can support the fundamental transition processes to a sustainable future and how it can provide guidance on the pathways to sustainability.

This book expands on law-related research by examining the legal aspects of sustainability with a focus on the impact on business strategies. It recognizes that firms must adopt an integrated approach to law and sustainability, considering multiple disciplines and goals, and serve as a forum for bringing together scholarship from fields such as environmental law, energy, government regulation and intellectual property. Firms increasingly have an interest in transitioning to sustainable business practices that take into consideration the fact that global resources are finite and will be increasingly scarce. They acknowledge that current actions have social, economic and environmental consequences and employ options to ensure that future generations have the same options and benefits. Examples of sustainable practices increasingly employed by firms include the institutionalization of “whole life-cycle” analysis in marketing and product design, utilization of sustainable inputs and energy sources, tracking and reporting sustainability performance, attempting the valuation of future generation prosperity and happiness as a discounting mechanism, and integrating sustainability into firm culture and management goals. It is clear that law and regulation have an extremely important role to play in the transition to more sustainable business practices. Broadly stated, law can provide structure for firms responding to forces that pull transition by enabling sustainability leadership and competitive advantage through funding models, intellectual property rights and collaboration means. Additionally, law can work to push transition by compelling firms to act through regulatory structures, accounting and governance mechanisms.

In this book 60 authors from many disciplines and from 18 countries on five continents examine in ten parts: Moving towards Sustainability Transition; Aiming at Sustainable Peace; Meeting Challenges of the 21st Century: Demographic Imbalances, Temperature Rise and the Climate–Conflict Nexus; Initiating Research on Global Environmental Change, Limits to Growth, Decoupling of Growth and Resource Needs; Developing Theoretical Approaches on Sustainability and Transitions; Analysing National Debates on Sustainability in North America; Preparing Transitions towards a Sustainable Economy and Society, Production and Consumption and Urbanization; Examining Sustainability Transitions in the Water, Food and Health Sectors from Latin American and European Perspectives; Preparing Sustainability Transitions in the Energy Sector; and Relying on Transnational, International, Regional and National Governance for Strategies and Policies Towards Sustainability Transition. This book is based on workshops held in Mexico (2012) and in the US (2013), on a winter school at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand (2013), and on commissioned chapters. The workshop in Mexico and the publication were supported by two grants by the German Foundation for Peace Research (DSF). All texts in this book were peer-reviewed by scholars from all parts of the world.

This book calls for the conditions of transition to sustainability: How to take into consideration new global phenomena such as and of the dimension of climate change, the depletion of natural resources, financial crises, demographic dynamics, global urbanization, migrations and mobility, while bearing in mind short-term or local place-based issues, such as social justice or quality of life? Meeting this challenge requires an inclusive approach of sustainability. It is a matter of designing a new social contract: Sustainability requires more than developing the right markets, institutions and metrics, it requires social momentum. To do so, many issues need a clear and complete answer: How to link social justice with sustainability policies? What governance tools to do so? What linkage between one decision-making level and the other? These are major issues to design sound transitions to sustainability.

It demonstrates that a great deal has been achieved in the field of environmental law since the 1990s. However, the extraordinary environmental crises facing humanity in the 21st century indicate a continuing urgent need for the generation of robus

This cutting-edge book invites readers to rethink environmental law and its critical role in ensuring a sustainable future for all. Illustrating narratives of successful developments in environmental law, contributors draw out key lessons and practices for effective reform and highlight opportunities by which we can respond to environmental challenges facing the planet.

This is a guide to making the United States environmentally sustainable. It explains the progress made to date on sustainability, including a description of the most significant obstacles to rapid and increased success. Building on the framework that has guided real progress so far, the author explains in detail how to make a greater variety of more sustainable decisions even more attractive, how law can provide an even better enabling environment for sustainability, and how public opinion and leadership can more effectively be engaged to support sustainability.

This book provides a comprehensive assessment of how national and international efforts to achieve carbon neutrality have been embraced as necessary to meet the requirements of the Paris Agreement as well as the needs of the planet. The authors explore the increasing tensions between aspirations and entrenched practices as methods to implement carbon neutrality are devised, particularly at the national and sub-national levels. This is perhaps best typified by efforts to shift from “dirty” energy production, such as coal, to greener alternatives, which are often supported in laws and rules but opposed by society. To bridge this void, the concept of just transitions has increasingly come to the forefront of international and national focus yet is often poorly understood. This book examines the ways in which just transitions have been proposed as a legal and regulatory bridge to address issues that result in societal resistance to implementation. It uses past and existing practice studies of just transitions before providing an analysis of how just transitions can be used to not only to assist in the shift to carbon neutrality but also in new shifts such as those caused by the Covid-19 pandemic impacts on economy, environment and society, and to address future global challenges.