The editorial team of Transnational Environmental Law (TEL) is thrilled to present the inaugural issue of 2024, centered on the themes of rights of nature, international climate law, and resource governance.

I. Rights of Nature

The first emphasis of this issue delves into the Rights of Nature, a movement very much animated by a thoroughgoing critique of existing environmental instruments. 

In the article of Matthias Petel, ‘The Illusion of Harmony: Power, Politics, and Distributive Implications of Rights of Nature’, he credits the Rights of Nature movement with the idea that ‘[m]ainstream environmental law is deeply anthropocentric and, therefore, inherently unable to achieve sustainability as it reproduces the very logic responsible for ecological collapse’.

In their article ‘Rights of Nature on the Island of Ireland: Origins, Drivers, and Implications for Future Rights of Nature Movements’, Rachel Killean, Jérémie Gilbert and Peter Doran conduct a qualitative, empirical study of the emergence of Rights of Nature in Ireland, where several local councils, in both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, have endorsed the rights of nature in recent years. 

II. International Climate Law

The second set of articles of the new TEL issue focuses on the design and implementation of international climate law. The gaps and shortcomings of this body of law are well known, and the research presented here interrogates the efficacy of the climate regime in the light of these shortcomings.

Alice Pirlot’s article ‘Carbon Leakage and International Climate Change Law’ examines the critical matter of carbon leakage. Pirlot presses the concern of leakage associated with emissions reduction policies further, contesting the common claim that ‘in the absence of an international agreement that fully harmonizes mitigation policies, carbon leakage constitutes an environmental problem and needs to be mitigated’.

Lukas Schütt’s article, ‘Permanence and Liability: Legal Considerations on the Integration of Carbon Dioxide Removal into the EU Emissions Trading System’, takes up the question of whether the Emissions Trading System (ETS) marketplace could provide CDR technologies with a ‘necessary financial boost’. CDR technologies vary in terms of the permanence of the carbon sink, but market integration would require carbon assets to be broadly fungible to promote market liquidity.

In her article ‘Measuring It, Managing It, Fixing It? Data and Rights in Transnational and Local Climate Change Governance’, Laura Mai confronts head-on the philosophical and social problems associated with the ‘datafication’ of climate change governance. 

Patrick Toussaint’s article, ‘Loss and Damage, Climate Victims, and International Climate Law: Looking Back, Looking Forward’, offers a critical assessment of the agreement concluded at COP27. The agreement established that the UNFCCC parties would create new funding arrangements to assist vulnerable developing countries in addressing loss and damage – though, as Toussaint predicted, without reference to some of the most contentious aspects, which include compensation, liability, reparations, admission of wrongdoing or historic responsibility. 

III. Resource Governance

The third set of articles of the new TEL issue take up issues of resource-specific governance.

In the article ‘Adapting Hydropower to European Union Water Law: Flexible Governance versus Legal Effectiveness in Sweden and Finland’, Suvi-Tuuli Puharinen, Antti Belinskij and Niko Soininen provide a case study of the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD), as applied in Finland and Sweden. The study examines how those two Nordic Member States, ordinarily ‘model students in the implementation of EU law’, have given effect to the WFD in the light of the fact that both states had ‘incorporated a strong permanence for hydropower permits’ that shielded such permits from the types of revision that the Directive could require.  Concluding the issue is Sébastien Jodoin and Kasia Johnson’s article, ‘The Intersections of Public Rights and Private Rules: An Analysis of Human Rights in Forestry and Fisheries Certification Standards’. The authors address the growing intersections of transnational environmental law with human rights, a field that is often held as having the potential to salvage public and private forms of resource governance. Jodoin and Johnson press two questions: ‘whether, how, and to what extent do environmental certification schemes address human rights norms and principles in their standards?’ and ‘how and why do schemes in different sectors of environmental governance differ in their levels of human rights adherence?’ 

Read the full issue here.