Anthropogenic climate change is causing temperature rise in temperate zones resulting in climate conditions more similar to subtropical zones. As a result, rising temperatures increase the range of disease-carrying insects to new areas outside of subtropical zones, and increased precipitation causes flooding that is more hospitable for vector breeding. State governments, the federal government, and governmental agencies, like the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) of USDA and the National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (NNDSS) of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, lack a coordinated plan for vector-borne disease accompanying climate change. APHIS focuses its surveillance primarily on the effect of illness on agricultural production, while NNDSS focuses on the emergence of pathogens affecting human health. This article provides an analysis of the current framework of surveillance of, and response to, vector-borne infectious diseases, the impacts of climate change on the spread of vector-borne infectious diseases, and recommends changes to federal law to address these threats.

Marine plastic pollution is increasing prominence in current discussions on the governance of the world’s oceans. The Southern Ocean is geographically remote but is still significantly impacted by plastic pollution. Plastic pollution in the Southern Ocean can derive from a variety of sources, including waste from research stations and fishing operations within the Treaty Area and, through transport by ocean currents and wind-generated water movements, from outside the Treaty Area. While there is a growing academic literature on marine plastic pollution in Antarctic, there is less attention to date on the response of the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) to this issue. This paper analyses how the ATS has engaged with the issue of plastic waste in general, and marine plastic pollution more particularly, from the entry into force of the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty in 1998–2019. Our results indicate that from 2017 the ATS has shown increased attention towards addressing locally sourced marine plastic pollution. A significant problem, however, remains with the respect to marine plastic pollution originating from outside Antarctic Treaty Area that requires a governance response from outside the ATS.

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.

A widespread response to the pressures placed on the ecological condition of rivers is the design and implementation of environmental flow regimes in domestic regulatory frameworks for water. Environmental interests in water are not confined to hydrological functioning but include relationships between water resources and human cultural and economic livelihoods, including those of Indigenous communities. Since the mid-1980s there has been some provision for environmental flows in Chilean law. However, the legal and policy requirements are limited in scope and have been poorly implemented by regulatory institutions. In this article we critically examine the treatment of environmental flows in Chilean legal and policy frameworks. We argue that there is an urgent need for a comprehensive minimum flow regime in Chile to protect the environmental qualities of rivers, which must also reflect and provide for Indigenous water rights and interests. The developing constitutional crisis in Chile, the most significant political crisis since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–90), highlights the need to revisit the sensitive and unresolved issues of water governance and equity.

Citizen activists play a role in translating public concern about the climate crisis to policymakers and elevating it on the political agenda. We consider the dynamic between citizen activists and the decision-makers they seek to influence and we review psychological research relevant to advocating for climate legislation. We conducted a study with citizen activists who lobby the US Congress for a carbon pricing policy to address climate change. The study assessed how activists think about four social psychological approaches: affirmation, social norms, legacy and immediacy. The findings provide a window into activists’ intuitions about which strategies to use, whom to use them with and their perceived effectiveness. A strategy of establishing shared values and common ground (affirmation) was used most frequently overall. A strategy emphasizing the long-term costs and benefits of addressing climate change (legacy) was employed less frequently than affirmation and seen as less effective by activists but it was the only strategy that was associated with perceived increases in Congressional Representatives’ support of the policy. Citizen activists and their interactions with elected officials provide an opportunity for social-behavioral scientists to understand and potentially overcome barriers to enacting climate policy.

Litigation has presented itself as a serious means to vindicate normative commitments about climate change by forcing governments to review their policy priorities. Today, the use of such litigation is not limited to the domestic arena. International law now provides the new principal avenue for such litigation. Two litigation strategies stand out: obligations strategy and rights strategy. Obligations strategy consists of bestowing an erga omnes character to existing obligations regarding the protection of the global environment, thereby providing standing for a non-injured party before international courts. Rights strategy, on the other hand, significantly increases in practice. It consists in the invocation, before national and international courts, of remedies for environmental damages through the legal categories of human rights law.

This article sheds light on the potential and limits of these litigation strategies in international law. The argument builds on the specific evolution in the legal architecture of international obligations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The current structure of the UNFCCC now makes it substantially impossible to bring a claim against individual states regarding their specific measures against climate change. The article, by referring to the history of drafting which produced the specific structure, questions the ability of these litigation strategies to remedy the lack of international consensus and to accommodate the technical intricacy of how to turn normative commitments into actual action for climate change.

Innovation is an important part of energy policy, and encouraging clean energy innovation is often an explicit goal of policy makers. For local governments, promoting clean energy innovation is seen not only as a pathway to a cleaner economy but also as a tool for promoting the local economy. But is such optimism warranted? There is a substantial literature examining the relationships between innovation and environmental policy, but few studies focus explicitly on innovation at the state and local level. In this paper, I provide key lessons from research on clean energy innovation, focusing on lessons relevant for state and local governments. I then summarize the results of a recent working paper by Fu et al. (2018) that studied wind energy innovation across individual states in the United States. While state-level policies can promote clean energy innovation, it is overall market size that matters most. Thus, innovation need not occur in those states most actively promoting clean energy. I conclude with lessons for state and local governments drawn from both this work and the broader literature on energy innovation.

Despite efforts to address the global forest crisis, deforestation and degradation continue, so we need to urgently revisit possible solutions. A failure to halt the global forest crisis contributes to climate change and biodiversity loss and will continue to result in inequalities in access to, and benefits from, forest resources. In this paper, we unpack a series of powerful myths about forests and their management. By exposing and better understanding these myths and what makes them so persistent, we have the basis to make the social and political changes needed to better manage and protect forests globally.

Labour market and unemployment policies in particular are rarely connected to issues of environmental sustainability. In the present article, the link is examined by focusing on ecosocial innovations in four European countries – Finland, Germany, Belgium and Italy. These innovations are small-scale associations, cooperatives or organizations that create new integrative practices combining both social and environmental goals. By asking how their social practices are linked with labour market and unemployment policies, we explore the scope for new ecosocial policies. The results of this cross-national case study lead to three lessons to be learnt for a future ecosocial welfare state: at the sectoral level, organizational level and individual level. In summary, many valuable ideas, instruments and programmes towards sustainability already exist in the field, but they are not yet integrated in the current labour market and unemployment policies.

Adaptation to climate change has traditionally been framed as a local problem. However, in recent years, adaptation has risen on the global policy agenda. This article contributes to the study of transnational climate adaptation through an investigation of international connectivity on climate adaptation between regional policy-makers. We examine the RegionsAdapt initiative, the first global commitment to promote and track the progress of regional adaptation. While adapting to climate change at the regional level is crucial, we suggest that transnational adaptation governance not only helps to promote adaptation measures, but also improves the process of tracking the progress of such action, its visibility and its aggregation.

The paper demonstrates how the evolution of international law on colonial and indigenous peoples, in particular evolving rights to sovereignty over natural resources, shaped the changing relationship between Greenland and the rest of the Danish Realm. Greenland today is in a unique position in international law, enjoying an extremely high degree of self-government. This paper explores the history, current status and future of Greenland through the lens of international law, to show how international obligations both colour its relationship with the Kingdom of Denmark and influence its approaches to resource development internally. It considers the invisibility of the Inuit population in the 1933 Eastern Greenland case that secured Danish sovereignty over the entire territory. It then turns to Denmark’s registration of Greenland as a non-self-governing territory (colony) in 1946 before Greenland’s-purported decolonisation in 1953 and the deficiencies of that process. In the second part of the 20th century, Denmark began to recognise the Greenland Inuit as an indigenous people before a gradual shift towards recognition of the Greenlanders as a people in international law, entitled to self-determination, including the right to permanent sovereignty over their natural resources. This peaked with the Self-Government Act of 2009. The paper will then go on to assess competing interpretations of the Self-Government Act of 2009 according to which the Greenland self-government is the relevant decision-making body for an increasing number of fields of competence including, since 1 January 2010, the governance of extractive industries. Some, including members of the Greenland self-government, argue that the Self-Government Act constitutes full implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP 2007), but this view is not universally shared. The paper also considers the status and rights of two Greenland minorities: the North Greenlanders (Inughuit) and the East Greenlanders, each of whom has distinct histories, experiences of colonisation, dialects (or languages) and cultural traditions. While the Kingdom of Denmark accepts the existence of only one indigenous people, namely, the Inuit of Greenland, this view is increasingly being challenged in international fora, including the UN human rights treaty bodies, as the two minorities are in some cases considered distinct indigenous peoples. Their current position in Greenland as well as in a future fully independent Greenland is examined, and the rights that they hold against the Greenland self-government as well as the Kingdom of Denmark explored. Greenland’s domestic regime for governance of non-renewable natural resources (principally mining and hydrocarbons) is briefly analysed and compared with international standards, with a particular emphasis on public participation. The paper assesses the extent to which it complies with the standards in key international instruments.

Several scholars have claimed or implied that the Paris Agreement imposes a collective obligation on states to keep global warming below 2°C, but what is a collective obligation from a legal point of view? The literature that asserts the existence of a collective obligation fails to address this question. In this article I argue two points. Firstly, while a legally binding collective obligation for states is not a theoretical impossibility, the Paris Agreement has not demonstrably created such an obligation; therefore, the collective obligation that appears in the treaty constitutes at most an objective of the Agreement, albeit a crucial one. Secondly, while state observance of the Agreement's apparent collective obligation (but, in fact, paramount objective) is necessary for the success of the treaty, the Agreement does not provide for a process to resolve the global mitigation burden into state-level ambition commitments to ensure that the paramount objective is met. While this is a significant failing of the Agreement, the provisions in the 2018 Paris Rulebook on the global stocktake are sufficiently loose to allow for this mechanism to play a role in the ‘individuation’ of the mitigation burden.

This article discusses the importance of the recently concluded Paris Rulebook, the extent to which it limits national discretion, instils discipline and generates ambition and accountability, and the challenges that lie ahead in implementing the 2015 Paris Agreement. It discusses, in particular, the rules on mitigation, transparency, the global stocktake and the implementation and compliance mechanism, in order to highlight the choices Parties made on three overarching issues that have long bedevilled the climate change regime—prescriptiveness (the level of detail of the rules), legal bindingness (the extent to which particular rules are legally binding) and differentiation (the extent to which particular rules accommodate differences between Parties or apply uniformly to all Parties).