3.1 Introduction
A broad landscape of laws can help deliver the CIRCle Framework functions of conceptualization, information, regulatory intervention, and coordination, which this book argues are vital to address cumulative environmental problems.Footnote 1 This chapter provides a bird’s eye view of this landscape, not aiming to be comprehensive, but to point to some major topographical features, as it were. I argue that rather than just a zoomed-in view of environmental impact assessment (“EIA”) – the original Western legal context for developing the terminology of cumulative effects – a broad range of laws and policies can and must deal with cumulative environmental problems.Footnote 2 Assessing how existing laws deal with any given cumulative environmental problem also requires navigating this much broader regulatory landscape.
Section 3.2 sketches the broad landscape of key domestic legal areas that can help address cumulative environmental problems – the scene for much of the book’s later discussion of legal mechanisms. Section 3.3 provides a brief supplementary discussion of international legal mechanisms. Each of the four chapters that follows explores a CIRCle Framework function using illustrative mechanisms from around the world and across many legal areas. Since so many areas of law influence cumulative environmental problems, Section 3.4 presents a simple “compass” for navigating this landscape. This helps to orient and structure an inquiry into a cumulative environmental problem. It also alerts regulatory designers to the typical advantages and disadvantages of different areas of law in delivering the CIRCle Framework functions of conceptualization, information, regulatory intervention, and coordination.
3.2 The Domestic Legal Landscape
Though we might think of EIA as the source of cumulative impact-related laws, to start building a more panoramic view of laws relevant to cumulative environmental problems, I take several steps back. I start by examining how traditional and customary laws may help address cumulative impacts, before considering the role of EIA, including strategic environmental assessment (“SEA”) law. Widening our gaze, I then discuss how cumulative impacts appear in broader environmental and natural resources laws, and in public law more generally. Finally, I briefly consider the role of international law and the policies of international organizations (particularly development banks) in dealing with cumulative environmental impacts.
3.2.1 The Traditional and Customary Law Canvas of Cumulative Effects Concepts
Discussions of cumulative impacts and the law commonly not only center on EIA but also start there. But traditional and First Nations’ environment-related laws are both a chronologically more accurate starting point and, in many cases, a source of law of continuing importance. For brevity, I use the term “traditional laws” to embrace the laws of Indigenous and other traditional peoples.
A substantial legal literature urges involving Indigenous and traditional peoples in environment-related laws, but traditional laws themselves warrant attention in the context of cumulative environmental problems. Indeed, traditional laws may speak to all four CIRCle Framework functions, influencing:
the conceptualization of what we should restore or protect from cumulative harm, including special places, practices, and relationships between people and their environments, which traditional laws may link in unique ways;Footnote 3
sources of information and appropriate ways of accessing information relevant to predicting or measuring environmental harms, drawing on traditional knowledges;Footnote 4
legal obligations to protect against and remedy cumulative environmental harm, for example, by engaging obligations related to cultural rights;Footnote 5 and
coordination, for example, by engaging potentially affected Indigenous and traditional peoples as important partners, with whom other governments coordinate in undertaking these functions.Footnote 6
Take the Nguni principle of ubuntu in southern Africa,Footnote 7 which has been described as “both the African principle of transcendence for the individual, and the law of the social bond.”Footnote 8 The individual is seen as “intertwined with others from the beginning of life”:Footnote 9 “[w]e come into the world obligated to others, and in turn these others are obligated to us, to the individual.”Footnote 10 Ubuntu also implies responsibility to past and future generations,Footnote 11 and a commitment to democratically building a “shared representation of reality.”Footnote 12 Such values and practices of interdependence are clearly relevant to conceptualizing linked human communities affected by cumulative harm, and to allocating responsibilities in a way that is more collective than individualistic.
Traditional laws appear in or influence contemporary formal laws in several ways that address cumulative environmental problems. “Pluralist” laws may directly reflect concepts from traditional laws that are relevant to cumulative impacts, including through recognizing Indigenous rights or customary law and reflecting Indigenous values in international environmental law regimes.Footnote 13 In this vein, ubuntu is recognized as a justiciable constitutional principle central to South African constitutional rights.Footnote 14 Less directly, traditional laws may influence the implementation of contemporary formal law and policy, including by Indigenous and traditional peoples participating in processes for implementing laws and policies under formal coordination mechanisms.Footnote 15 Just as importantly, in introducing new regulatory approaches to deal with cumulative impacts, regulatory designers should carefully consider how any proposal would interact with traditional and customary laws and avoid any potential adverse effects on customary rights.Footnote 16
3.2.2 EIA, SEA, and Western Scientific Cumulative Effects Concepts
All-embracing versus narrow and selective, the contrast between some traditional laws and project-level EIA law could not be greater. Project-level EIA originated in the United States National Environmental Policy Act of 1969,Footnote 17 then spread to various US states, with other countries following suit in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote 18 EIA is now globally ubiquitous.Footnote 19
Globally, most national EIA laws include a cumulative impacts provision.Footnote 20 These provisions occur in the laws of all major legal traditions: common law (as in Canada, United Kingdom), civil law (as in France, Italy), Islamic law (as in Saudi Arabia, Mauritania), and mixed systems (as in Malta, Zimbabwe); they occur less frequently in Asia and Australasia at the national level.Footnote 21
The EIA process involves several stages, including “screening” a project to determine the need for environmental assessment; “scoping” to determine key elements of the environment expected to be impacted, relevant baseline conditions and alternatives to the project; substantive prediction and evaluation of impacts of the project (environmental assessment); public participation; the final decision; and follow-up.Footnote 22 EIA laws often define cumulative impacts and require them to be considered at several of these stages. A representative definition of cumulative effects – from the many that exist in EIA law – is effects “that result from additive effects caused by other past, present, or reasonably foreseeable actions together with the plan, programme, or project itself and synergistic effects (in combination) which arise from the interaction between effects of a development plan, programme or project, on different components of the environment.”Footnote 23
The concept of cumulative impact performs different roles in the EIA processes envisioned by different legislative schemes. First, cumulative impacts may be a screening criterion, which must be considered to determine whether a project requires any form of environmental assessment at all. For example, EIA may be required if a project falls into a named category (like a power plant) or is likely to create cumulative impacts.Footnote 24 An alternative formulation is to require EIA for a development proposal that is likely to “significantly” affect the environment, which requires considering, among other things, “the potential for cumulative environmental impacts.”Footnote 25 As a screening criterion, cumulative impacts provisions theoretically may be highly influential: They expand the use of EIA outside its usual bounds if they trigger EIA requirements for activities of a category or scale that is usually exempt.
For projects that require EIA, cumulative impacts influence a second role, scoping, by affecting the type of environmental assessment required. For example, if the project “generates cumulative and/or indirect and/or synergistic effects,” this may trigger a requirement to carry out an environmental impact study involving deeper analysis.Footnote 26 It may also “upgrade” the assessment type required to a more publicly contestable form of assessment.
The third, and most obvious, role of the concept of cumulative impacts is that of cumulative impact assessment (CIA): influencing the substantive content of the environmental assessment. This is expressed in diverse ways in different statutes: the assessment must, or may (variously) require a description of the “cumulative impacts” of the proposed project;Footnote 27 the “cumulative and synergistic” consequences of the project;Footnote 28 or the “cumulative and synergistic impacts and the induced risks” of the project.Footnote 29 Theoretically speaking, this is the stage at which the deepest inquiry into cumulative impacts would be expected.
Finally, cumulative effects may be included in an EIA law’s definition of environmental harm,Footnote 30 impact,Footnote 31 or effect.Footnote 32 This has potentially further-reaching application not only to all stages of EIA but also the post-EIA process. For example, where a proponent must monitor a project’s ongoing impacts, this could require analysis to understand these impacts in light of the cumulative impacts of other projects. This highlights the challenges associated with findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable data, discussed earlier,Footnote 33 to facilitate this continuing analysis.
EIA that includes CIA differs from “regular” EIA in important ways. Firstly, it involves, at least to some extent, identifying other actors and actions in the past, present, and reasonably foreseeable future that impact the same element of the environment. By contrast, regular EIA does not disaggregate actions; instead, it tends to consider the overall effects of those actions as environmental “context” or “existing circumstances.”Footnote 34 Thus, CIA highlights not only the metaphorical “thousand cuts” but also who wields (and has wielded, and will wield) a sword. Secondly, considering other actors in space and time expands CIA-inclusive EIA’s spatial and temporal boundaries relative to regular EIA.Footnote 35 CIA also alters EIA investigations by considering whether “individually minor effects will be collectively significant,”Footnote 36 illuminating relatively small, potentially unregulated effects that regular EIA may otherwise disregard. Finally, CIA also emphasizes nonlinear responses, such as impacts that become amplified or exponentially greater due to other development activities and natural background changes in environmental conditions.Footnote 37 By contrast, “traditional” EIA tends to conceptualize a single source of impact in isolation,Footnote 38 potentially underrepresenting to decision-makers and the public the true extent of likely environmental harm. Considering cumulative impacts exposes the true extent of a project’s potential harm and, by revealing the full suite of contributors to the harm, also exposes more options for reducing aggregate environmental damage.Footnote 39
Nelson and Shirley have argued elsewhere that these differences potentially produce two distinct benefits. They provide better technical information for a decision-maker by casting new light on the impacts of the proposed project in the context of other projects in the same environment. CIA also spotlights decisions about what matters, thereby inviting deliberation and exposing differences for contestation in a transparent way.Footnote 40
Rather than EIA, which focuses on a single project, SEA law is often argued to be the more appropriate way to assess and manage cumulative impacts.Footnote 41 It enables a more proactive, strategic consideration of cumulative impacts over a longer term in a way that can analyze potential future scenarios resulting from different policy choices at a larger geographic scale and with greater opportunity for collaboration.Footnote 42 However, compared to EIA, SEA and its cousin, regional plans,Footnote 43 are used comparatively rarely.Footnote 44 Perhaps more troubling is the criticism that SEA sometimes seems to have little influence on decision-making.Footnote 45 The Great Barrier Reef case study explores this issue a decade after the Reef SEA, suggesting that, at least in that context, the SEA had a significant influence on interventions related to water quality.Footnote 46 Increasing interest in using SEA to structure the renewable energy transition highlights the importance of a pathway to increasing the impact of SEA.Footnote 47
3.2.3 Natural Resources, Pollution, Conservation, and Other Environment-Related Laws
Many environmental threats simply do not trigger project-level EIA or SEA requirements. As a result, even if cumulative impacts requirements under these laws were formulated ideally in law on paper and implemented well in practice, they could not adequately address the real-world cumulative impacts on matters of concern to which those assessments were directed. This highlights the desirability of understanding and improving how cumulative impact considerations appear in broader areas of environment-related law, not as an “add-on,” but as an integral part of these laws. While EIA and SEA laws are typically procedural in nature, geared toward producing information to inform decisions about large projects rather than changing interventions, environment-related laws in other areas provide for a broader range of functions in relation to a broader range of activities.
Take natural resources planning and management laws in domains such as water, forestry, fisheries, and hunting rights. These laws are natural legal venues for responding to cumulative impacts,Footnote 48 albeit on a single issue, because they provide scope to consider many individual impacts over a region covered by a plan. Perhaps the legal intervention that most clearly expresses the concept of cumulative impacts is a limit placed on resource extraction such as a cumulative total volume of water that may be withdrawn from a river.Footnote 49 These types of interventions may be accompanied by mechanisms to conceptualize precisely what should be protected and provide information and coordination relating to it, as shown by the many examples used later in this book.Footnote 50
Rather than focusing on the aggregate effects of taking resources away from an environment, pollution law provides a further context for considering cumulative impacts by focusing on the aggregate effects of putting pollution into an environment. Mechanisms to limit aggregate pollution, like a “total maximum daily load” that limits the granting of pollution discharge licensesFootnote 51 are long-established. They now have newer legal siblings specifically designed to address cumulative impacts, such as risk-based “general environmental duties” that apply to all activities, regardless of size.Footnote 52 Like natural resources laws, many pollution laws have a narrow focus on individual “silos” of activities or impacts; this invites us to investigate how legal mechanisms can span these silos to consider cumulative impacts – a key question to which later chapters return.Footnote 53
Laws that establish areas protected for conservation purposes may also include cumulative impact concepts, but in a way that recalibrates the focus to the “matter of concern” to be protected or restored, rather than the type of activity or impact that causes harm. The Great Barrier Reef case study demonstrates complex legal arrangements to protect a marine park, with a focus on cumulative impacts to the area from both marine and land-based sources.Footnote 54 The South Tyrol case study focuses on incentive-based interventions to promote ecologically valuable grazing on Alpine grasslands, with a focus on those designated as valuable habitat under European legal instruments.Footnote 55 Numerous examples throughout the book illustrate how conservation laws address cumulative harm to things as diverse as the geysers of Yellowstone National Park in the United States, to wildlife on communal land in Tanzania, to the Kiribati Phoenix Islands Protected Area.Footnote 56 Emerging nature restoration laws, and, to some extent, rights of nature laws, focus on reversing a legacy of cumulative degradation to places and ecosystems.Footnote 57
Coastal zone and marine spatial planning and land use planning, beyond protected areas, advance cumulative impact concepts by adopting a regional-scale view and covering multiple sources and types of impact. Coastal zone and marine spatial planning are well-established contexts for managing cumulative impacts.Footnote 58 Unlike EIA law, land use planning has the advantage of influencing many categories of development of many sizes in a region, rather than being restricted to large projects. However, both land use planning and EIA law scrutinize only new developments or changes in land use, rather than the ongoing impacts of existing uses. Nonetheless, land use laws provide scope for expressing cumulative impact concerns at the intersection of people and the environment. This is epitomized in the cumulative view of environmental justice – the accumulation of environmental and socioeconomic burdens – which is considered under land use and other areas of law in California, discussed further in the Central Valley case study.Footnote 59
Later chapters of this book reveal a rich array of other environment-related legal mechanisms that contribute an important function to help deal with a cumulative environmental problem, whether or not they make explicit or implicit reference to cumulative impacts. Demonstrating this diversity, they include laws to incentivize traditional agricultural practices, limit the carbon embodied in buildings, manage traffic to reduce ambient air pollution, and publicize corporate reports on greenhouse gas emissions, among many others.
3.2.4 Cumulative Environmental Problems in Broader Public Law Settings
Some legal scholars point to the narrowness of even these broader environmental and natural resources laws. These scholars warn of environmental risks posed by “concatenations of political, economic and cultural threats,”Footnote 60 and urge us to question more fundamental structures and practices of our society, and the laws that support them. Larger drivers of environmental change may link to legal arrangements that indirectly drive cumulative harm. For example, domestic advertising and other laws drive unsustainable food systems in a way that is difficult to address using isolated policy tools rather than more holistic interventions that address broader social, commercial, and political dimensions of the problem.Footnote 61 This view points to the potential for harnessing even broader public laws to deal with cumulative impacts, beyond specific environment-related statutes.
While a specific cumulative environmental problem will dictate which of these broader areas of law are most relevant in a way that is difficult to generalize or discuss here in detail, it is worth noting the general potential of constitutional laws. Constitutions provide for environmental values in diverse ways. Some provisions have potential to address cumulative harm by seeking to secure outcomes (e.g., a “healthy environment,” secured by an enforceable right). Other, “contrajudicative” provisions provide for outputs, such as requiring legislation about an environmental matter in the case of a constitutional directive provision, which does not specify the outcome requiredFootnote 62 but nonetheless provides scope for action to address cumulative harms.
Enforceable constitutional human rights to a healthy environment form a relatively prominent vehicle for considering cumulative impacts that limit the right. The South African Fuel Retailers case connected, on one hand, an EIA-based statutory requirement to consider the cumulative impacts of a development on “the environment, socio-economic conditions and cultural heritage” with, on the other hand, the precautionary principle and South Africa’s constitutional environmental right.Footnote 63 The decision-maker was found not to have considered the cumulative effects of the “proliferation of filling stations” on the relevant aquifer, nor the cumulative socioeconomic impacts on existing filling stations, as it was required to do.Footnote 64
More recently, in the German Constitutional Court, claimants in the Neubauer case successfully argued that Germany’s failure to introduce a greenhouse gas emissions cap required by the Paris Agreement violated constitutional freedoms, which were informed by a directive provision that the state “shall protect the natural foundations of life and animals by legislation.”Footnote 65 The Court found that future generations would bear a greater burden on account of the depletion of the available CO2 budget (a cumulative concept) in a way that was not constitutionally justified. More timely transition to climate neutrality was required.Footnote 66
Meanwhile, constitutional coordination provisions that provide for multiple levels of government to coordinate actions are important to cumulative environmental problems: These problems often engage multiple levels of government,Footnote 67 and coordinating functions is vital to an effective response.Footnote 68 The South Tyrol case study shows how a mosaic of legislative powers granted to national and provincial governments contribute to protecting Alpine grasslands, with associated coordination arrangements that deliver the constitutional principle of “loyal cooperation.”Footnote 69
3.3 the International Legal Landscape
This book focuses mainly on domestic legal systems and contexts for regulatory design, but connections between national and international contexts are an important part of this picture. Indeed, international and supranational laws, norms, or institutions arise in each of the case studies. These range from the internationally informed human right to water in California, to the World Heritage status of the Great Barrier Reef, to the tangle of supranational and international law that influences Alpine grasslands in South Tyrol. For completeness, this section sets out a brief analysis of the ways in which international legal arrangements deal expressly with cumulative environmental impacts, focusing on treaties and multilateral development bank policies.
3.3.1 International Law
EIA law began its migration from the domestic to the international realm in the 1970s,Footnote 70 developing early international statements on EIA.Footnote 71 The most broadly ratified EIA treaty, the Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment in a Transboundary Context (Espoo Convention),Footnote 72 is silent on whether its project-level EIA obligations extend to cumulative impacts. The Convention appears to assume that national laws will supply EIA procedures,Footnote 73 and includes cumulative impact concepts only in the context of SEA, rather than EIA.Footnote 74
Other multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) refer expressly to cumulative impacts in one of two ways. The first type applies to projects generally, mirroring national EIA laws. Notably, the Regional Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters in Latin America and the Caribbean (Escazú Agreement)Footnote 75 requires parties to make public “a description of the main environmental impacts of the project or activity and, as appropriate, the cumulative environmental impact.”Footnote 76 By contrast, the geographically wider 1998 Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (Aarhus Convention)Footnote 77 does not expressly mention cumulative impacts, though related guidance does do so in a cursory way.Footnote 78
A second type of MEA containing cumulative impact provisions applies to specific regional environments or contexts, such as marine, coastal, and mountain environments.Footnote 79 The geographic limitation of these MEAs is arguably a strength: Like terrestrial and marine spatial planning at the domestic level, focusing on a mountain range or sea aligns with scientific aspirations that CIA occur at an ecologically relevant regional scale,Footnote 80 and may capture the extent of a distinct environment that experiences adverse effects. MEAs that expressly use cumulative impact concepts do so in different ways. Some require or suggestFootnote 81 that cumulative impacts be considered as a component of substantive environmental assessment.Footnote 82 Others use cumulative impact concepts to categorize areas for protection and propose activities for control.Footnote 83 As a further alternative, cumulative impacts expressly may be relevant to a duty to consult and cooperate with other Parties about activities.Footnote 84
Finally, as the case studies later in this book illustrate, MEAs may provide for regulatory functions that help to address cumulative environmental problems even where their texts do not expressly mention cumulative impacts. A request from a Committee under the World Heritage Convention triggered an influential SEA of the Great Barrier Reef, which focused on cumulative impacts;Footnote 85 meanwhile, the Paris Agreement’s climate target influenced Australia’s statutory targets years after the SEA, which largely ignored climate mitigation despite the Reef’s extreme vulnerability to climate change.Footnote 86 The Alpine Convention, a regional MEA, and several biodiversity-focused treaties are an important part of the picture of mechanisms that interventions that promote traditional grazing practices that support Alpine grasslands in South Tyrol, Italy.Footnote 87 Guidance documents produced by treaty bodies may also expressly call attention to cumulative impacts even where the treaties themselves do not.Footnote 88 Like domestic laws, then, we see that international laws can focus on a matter of concern, impacts, and activities in a way that contributes to addressing cumulative environmental problems – not to speak of other treaties outside environmental regimes that indirectly influence cumulative harm.Footnote 89
Beyond treaties, customary international law presents limitations for adopting cumulative impact concepts, at least for project-level environmental assessment. Forming consistent state practiceFootnote 90 on including CIA in EIA and demonstrating accompanying opinio juris appear challenging. It is difficult to attribute state motivation to international obligation, and state practice requires action beyond treaty obligationsFootnote 91 and technically excludes EIA undertaken by non-state entities.Footnote 92 In any case, the wealth of treaties that impose EIA obligations reduce the importance of a stand-alone customary obligation.Footnote 93
3.3.2 Multilateral Development Banks
Policies of multilateral development banks (“banks”) present a further context for considering international responses to cumulative environmental problems. Bank operational policies are not binding in the same way as national legislation and ratified MEAs, but these policies must be followed in the execution of individual funded development projects,Footnote 94 for example, assessing the environmental impact of constructing a hydroelectric dam. Operational policies use the concept of cumulative impacts in varied ways, sometimes without definitions.Footnote 95 Some policies suggest that EIA ought to consider cumulative impacts;Footnote 96 others also link cumulative impacts to screening and scoping.Footnote 97
The significance of these policies extends beyond individual projects; bank operational policies can also evolve into norms that influence or even bind third parties, such as investors, far beyond the parameters of discrete lending agreements.Footnote 98 For example, bank policies on cumulative impacts may be referenced in EIA documents for major projects in countries that are not borrowers, as has occurred for port developments on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.Footnote 99
3.4 A Compass for the Regulatory Landscape
This chapter has argued that a great variety of laws can help address cumulative environmental problems. Indeed, realistically, no one type of law could single-handedly address the incremental, creeping degradation of environments that we care about. At the same time, ongoing degradation suggests that there are problems with how laws take up this challenge on paper or in practice – or both.
To diagnose gaps, weaknesses, and strengths, we need to cast a regulatory eye across a panoramic landscape of laws. We can orient ourselves by asking a simple question: What is the core purpose of this area of law, what is its focus? Reflecting on key differences in legal focus helps to structure an analysis across this landscape, as illustrated by the case study analyses. A law’s focus also raises hypotheses for regulatory designers to consider about its advantages, disadvantages, and predispositions in relation to the CIRCle Framework functions of conceptualization, information, regulatory intervention, and coordination.
We can distinguish between laws that focus on a matter of concern (like a protected conservation area law or an endangered species law), from those that focus on specific kinds of activities (like mining, or farming) or impacts (like many EIA laws, pollution or natural resources laws), from those that have indirect influence, for example, by dealing with crosscutting institutional or coordination issues (as in allocating legislative powers over the environment among different levels of government, with associated rules for resolving disputes)Footnote 100 (Figure 3.1). These general distinctions are applied in each case study presented later in this bookFootnote 101 as a way to chart an analytical course through many relevant laws, noting that in some cases a law may span these categories.
Laws relevant to regulating cumulative environmental problems
Figure 3.1 Long description
The factors from the top to bottom read Matters of Concern with examples of national park laws and environmental justice laws, Impacts with E I A and water pollution laws, Activities with mining and agricultural laws, and Indirect Influences with laws for intergovernmental coordination, and trade laws. The text at the top reads A wide landscape of laws is relevant to cumulative environmental problems.
Determining the focus of a particular law can also point to potential areas of weakness that deserve the attention of regulatory designers. A law that focuses on a matter of concern may have strong mechanisms for conceptualization, but pay less attention to other CIRCle Framework functions. A law that focuses on coordination generally between levels of government (an indirect influence) may not provide much clarity about the regulatory functions that need coordination in an environmental context; and other like issues. The design of specific impact-focused laws, like those dealing with greenhouse gas emissions, may need more express attention to how they connect to laws that deal with other types of impact than will be the case for project-focused laws, which inherently consider multiple impacts of a single project. This is the classic problem of legal “silos” obstructing connected decision-making, to which the chapter on regulatory intervention returns, and the Great Barrier Reef case study explores.Footnote 102
3.5 Conclusion
This chapter has argued that a great variety of laws can usefully contribute to addressing cumulative environmental problems. These laws include the EIA and SEA laws that attract the attention of the literature that discusses cumulative impacts most prominently. But far broader laws are also relevant, including traditional and customary laws, natural resources allocation laws, laws for protected areas and species, terrestrial and marine planning, and broader public laws. International law and policy can also be an important part of this picture.
The regulatory landscape sketched here includes laws that have diverse core purposes and typical approaches. Regulatory designers might usefully consider these differences in their jurisdiction, and how they might present advantages and disadvantages in delivering CIRCle Framework functions.
Each cumulative environmental problem will engage a unique set of laws from across this broad regulatory landscape. Evaluating how these laws deal with a problem involves first finding them, then considering them together, including how different regulatory functions interact, and the degree to which they are integrated. The case study chapters illustrate this to examine different sets of functions using diverse collections of laws across all of the categories discussed here. Chapter 8 tackles groundwater sustainability in California, examining how conceptualization interacts with the other CIRCle Framework functions through a natural resources planning law. Chapter 9 focuses on the ecological health of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, examining how SEA links information and regulatory intervention across diverse laws for protecting the Reef, addressing carbon and water pollution, and managing development activities. Finally, Chapter 10 explores how intervention and coordination – across multiple vertical levels of government, using laws that span nature protection, impact assessment, agriculture, landscape, and governance – protect biocultural landscapes in South Tyrol, Italy.
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