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This is a book about the improbable: seeking legal relief for pollution in contemporary China. In a country known for tight political control and ineffectual courts, Environmental Litigation in China unravels how everyday justice works: how judges make decisions, why lawyers take cases, and how international influence matters. It is a readable account of how the leadership's mixed signals and political ambivalence play out on the ground - propelling some, such as the village doctor who fought a chemical plant for more than a decade, even as others back away from risk. Yet this remarkable book shows that even in a country where expectations would be that law wouldn't much matter, environmental litigation provides a sliver of space for legal professionals to explore new roles and, in so doing, probe the boundary of what is politically possible.

Inspired by recent litigation, this book identifies and critically appraises the manifold and varied approaches to calculating compensation for damage caused to the environment. It examines a wide range of practice on compensation - in general and specifically for environmental damage - from that of international courts and tribunals, as well as international commissions and regimes, to municipal approaches and other disciplines such as economics and philosophy. Compensation for Environmental Damage Under International Law synthesises these approaches with a view to identifying their blind spots, bringing clarity to an area where there exists broad discrepancy, and charting best practices that appropriately balance the manifold interests at stake. In particular, it is argued that best practice methodologies should ensure compensation serves to fully repair the environment, reflect the emerging ecosystems approach and any implications environmental damage may have for climate change, as well as take into account relevant equitable considerations. This book is essential reading for academics, practitioners and students working in the field of environmental law.

Environmental principles are elusive concepts in environmental law - their meanings and legal functions are ambiguous, and they have varying histories in different jurisdictions. This book explores the legal understanding of environmental principles.

The development of modern environmental law in Indonesia has not led to significant improvements in environmental quality. A key challenge is the limited public understanding of environmental law, compounded by the predominance of traditional, religious, and mystical perspectives within Indonesian society. This study aims to investigate the existence and role of customary environmental law in Indonesia and assess its potential contribution to the national environmental legal framework. A qualitative approach was employed, involving document analysis and field observations in communities known for strong adherence to customary practices. Data were analyzed to identify principles and practices of environmental management rooted in local customs. The findings reveal that customary environmental law exists and regulates both the utilization and conservation of the environment according to indigenous norms. This legal tradition operates beyond the realm of local wisdom, suggesting the emergence of a distinct subsystem within Indonesia's environmental law. Customary environmental law offers valuable insights for the formulation and revision of national environmental legislation. Integrating these customary principles could enhance the effectiveness and cultural relevance of Indonesia's environmental governance.

Drawing insight from a diverse array of sources - including moral philosophy, political theory, cognitive psychology, ecology, and science and technology studies - Douglas Kysar offers a new theoretical basis for understanding environmental law and policy. He exposes a critical flaw in the dominant policy paradigm of risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis, which asks policymakers to, in essence, \"regulate from nowhere.\" As Kysar shows, such an objectivist stance fails to adequately motivate ethical engagement with the most pressing and challenging aspects of environmental law and policy, which concern how we relate to future generations, foreign nations, and other forms of life. Indeed, world governments struggle to address climate change and other pressing environmental issues in large part because dominant methods of policy analysis obscure the central reasons for acting to ensure environmental sustainability. To compensate for these shortcomings, Kysar first offers a novel defense of the precautionary principle and other commonly misunderstood features of environmental law and policy. He then concludes by advocating a movement toward environmental constitutionalism in which the ability of life to flourish is always regarded as a luxury wecanafford.

This pathfinding guide concentrates the regulation of pollution in Scotland, including the common law controls. It includes sections on nuisance (including statutory nuisance), noise, air pollution (including climate change), waste, contaminated land and water pollution, planning and control of pollution, and nature conservation. The author also assesses the contribution of European environmental law on the law within Scotland.

This paper employs the slack-based measure method and an extended Luenberger productivity indicator to estimate and decompose the atmospheric environmental performance under the constraints of energy and atmospheric pollutant emissions [i.e., the growth of the atmospheric environment total factor productivity (AETFP)] of the “three regions and ten urban agglomerations” (TRTAs) in China. Specifically, undesirable output is considered as both carbon and air pollutant emissions, i.e., CO2, SO2, and NOx emissions. Also, based on the proposed approach, we identify the different paths of the technical change as a crucial driver of the AETFP growth. Furthermore, using the spatial econometric model with a symmetric geographical distance weight matrix and an asymmetric economic geography weight matrix, we investigate the effect of different types of environmental regulation on the AETFP growth to verify the Porter hypothesis in China. The results show that the main drivers of China’s atmospheric environment inefficiency are air pollutant emissions (SO2 and NOx), carbon emissions, and fossil energy use. Spatially, the environment inefficiency presents a decreasing trend from northern China to southern China. The improved performance of SO2 emissions made more contributions to the AETFP growth during China’s 11th “Five-Year Plan” period (2006–2010), while NOx emissions has a marginal positive effect on the AETFP growth is marginal. Despite the differences in the technical change across regions, the technical progress offsets the negative impact of declining technical efficiency on the AETFP growth. Overall, energy-saving and emission-reduction policies and technologies in TRTAs exert a decisive influence on the AETFP growth. In particular, the spatial econometric results indicate that the market-motivated environmental regulation has a positive effect on the AETFP growth and thus conforms to the Porter hypothesis in China but does not cause the “race-to-the-bottom” effect among local governments, while the command-and-control oriented regulation leads to a “race-to-the-bottom” effect and undermines the AETFP growth.

Rethinking Private Authorityexamines the role of non-state actors in global environmental politics, arguing that a fuller understanding of their role requires a new way of conceptualizing private authority. Jessica Green identifies two distinct forms of private authority--one in which states delegate authority to private actors, and another in which entrepreneurial actors generate their own rules, persuading others to adopt them. Drawing on a wealth of empirical evidence spanning a century of environmental rule making, Green shows how the delegation of authority to private actors has played a small but consistent role in multilateral environmental agreements over the past fifty years, largely in the area of treaty implementation. This contrasts with entrepreneurial authority, where most private environmental rules have been created in the past two decades. Green traces how this dynamic and fast-growing form of private authority is becoming increasingly common in areas ranging from organic food to green building practices to sustainable tourism. She persuasively argues that the configuration of state preferences and the existing institutional landscape are paramount to explaining why private authority emerges and assumes the form that it does. In-depth cases on climate change provide evidence for her arguments. Groundbreaking in scope,Rethinking Private Authoritydemonstrates that authority in world politics is diffused across multiple levels and diverse actors, and it offers a more complete picture of how private actors are helping to shape our response to today's most pressing environmental problems

This study investigates how the enactment of regulations and laws dealing with climate change influences CO2 emissions. Using a sample of 83 countries and covering the period from 2003 to 2014, our dynamic panel analysis yields two major results. First, the enactment of new climate change regulations (i.e., amendments, decrees, orders) associated with a strong rule of law significantly diminishes CO2 emissions. This result validates the hypothesis of Gunningham (J Environ Law 23:169–201, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1093/jel/eqr006), which argues that the efficiency of environmental legislation must be supported by regulatory institutions that can efficiently enforce the law. Second, the enactment of new climate change laws seems to not impact emissions levels independently of institutional quality. It may be possible that private agents anticipate the entry into force of the new law(s) and must consequently adapt to the requirements of such laws, leading to a nonsignificant impact on CO2 emissions.

We investigate whether and how government fiscal squeeze affects local firms’ pollution emissions. To establish causality, we introduce a policy shock in China, namely, the canceling of agricultural taxes in 2005, to document that governments’ fiscal squeeze due to sudden tax decreases substantially increases local firms’ emission by approximately 4%. Mechanism analyses show that local fiscal squeeze result in aggravating pollution emissions through inducing the reduction of firms’ efforts on green innovation and abatement activities. Cross-sectionally, the effects of local government fiscal squeeze on pollution emissions are mitigated by environmental regulation, marketization development, but strengthened by firm financial pressure.