1. Introduction
The first few months of 2026 have, once again, underscored the interconnectedness of global society. At the time of writing, it is 100 days since the United States (US) and Israeli governments instigated the war in Iran,Footnote 1 which led to increased regional conflict in the Middle East and to the closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz. These acts have global reverberations. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical gateway for the export of oil and gas from the Persian Gulf to many parts of the world. With fossil fuel reserves already low in many countries, the shortage of oil and gas is leading to a spike in energy prices across the globe.Footnote 2 Somewhat ironically, it also means that the US Trump administration, which has withdrawn from the Paris AgreementFootnote 3 and is rolling back climate legislation in an unprecedented fashion,Footnote 4 is inadvertently creating incentives for the increased uptake of clean energy technologies across the globe.Footnote 5 However, the war in Iran is also likely to have other, potentially more serious impacts: the Strait of Hormuz is also a maritime chokepoint for about a third of the global trade in fertilizers, which are produced using natural gas.Footnote 6 As the use of fertilizers is essential for global agricultural production, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is warning of a ‘severe global food price crisis within six to 12 months’.Footnote 7
The Iran war and the unfolding energy and food price crises illustrate the ‘teleconnections’ that characterize the globalized world of today.Footnote 8 The ‘global village’Footnote 9 created by intricate trade, financial, and other economic relationships, amplified through digital technologies, has challenged the notion of what can be considered spatially ‘remote’, with important implications for environmental law. Climate change, pandemics, biodiversity loss, plastics waste: these are all global environmental challenges where laws and regulations developed in one part of the world affect other parts of the world, and vice versa.
The interconnectedness of global society not only has a spatial dimension, but also a temporal one. Environmental law is shaped by the past,Footnote 10 but it also increasingly seeks to shape future outcomes, particularly for ‘long problems’ such as climate change.Footnote 11 Concepts such as intergenerational equity are being translated into concrete norms and institutions, whether it is through the German Federal Constitutional Court ruling that the country’s framework climate law should include a more ambitious short-term climate target to respect the rights of future generations,Footnote 12 or through the creation of ombudspersons for future generations.Footnote 13
Transnational environmental law, as a field of study, is well placed to address both the spatial and the temporal dimensions of global environmental problems, as is shown by the various contributions to this issue of Transnational Environmental Law (TEL). These contributions cover a variety of issue areas, including nature conservation and restoration, oil spills, climate change, deforestation, pathogens, corporate due diligence, and environmental impact assessment (EIA). They also show methodological diversity, ranging from traditional doctrinal analysis to qualitative coding and social network analysis.
2. Transnational Environmental Law across Space
Value chains are one way in which actors in different countries are connected. Decisions made by consumers in one country – such as to eat beef – may have environmental impacts in another – methane emissions and deforestation in the country where cattle are raised. This is the basic rationale underpinning the European Union’s (EU) Deforestation Regulation (EUDR).Footnote 14
The EUDR is one of the most prominent examples of a range of measures with extraterritorial effect adopted by the EU to implement the European Green Deal,Footnote 15 which also include the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM)Footnote 16 and the Methane Regulation.Footnote 17 These measures employ the EU’s global market power to bring about environmental improvements such as climate change mitigation, reducing electronic waste, or tackling deforestation. However, these measures have also sparked significant resistance from some of the nations whose exports to the EU are affected by the measures. For instance, the EU’s biofuel sustainability criteria under the Renewable Energy DirectiveFootnote 18 were the subject of disputes at the World Trade Organization (WTO),Footnote 19 and countries such as India and China have voiced their concerns about the CBAM in various international fora.Footnote 20
In the first article of this issue, Jessica Stubenrauch and Till Markus assess the EUDR, which puts in place due diligence requirements for companies with respect to forest risk commodities (that is, commodities associated with forest degradation and deforestation) such as soy, beef, coffee, and oil palm, also including exporters within its scope.Footnote 21 After explaining the regulatory design of the EUDR, Stubenrauch and Markus focus on one country that is likely to be significantly affected when the Regulation will start to be applicable at the end of 2026, namely Indonesia. The EUDR would go beyond Indonesia’s existing legislation and certification system for sustainable palm oil production. As a consequence, the authors argue, access for smallholders to the EU market may be restricted. Stubenrauch and Markus also point to the risk of strategic behaviour, with producers simply exporting to other countries commodities that do not meet the EUDR requirements. At the same time, they point out that application of the EUDR beyond EU borders may also engender positive effects, including improved transparency along the supply chain and strengthening the legal protection of forests. To avoid the drawbacks of measures with extraterritorial effects while reaping the benefits, Stubenrauch and Markus offer several recommendations for the implementation of such measures, including an ongoing dialogue and partnership with potentially affected countries, consultation with marginalized communities, respect for WTO law (specifically its non-discrimination disciplines), and ensuring that the measures are proportionate to the ends pursued.
The EUDR due diligence regime fits within a broader trend of corporate due diligence requirements that seek to identify, assess, prevent, and minimize human rights and environmental damage. Such requirements were initially formulated in soft-law instruments such as the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human RightsFootnote 22 and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises.Footnote 23 Increasingly, however, they are also integrated into binding legal instruments such as the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive.Footnote 24 By governing global value chains, these instruments again offer an avenue for regulating ‘remote’ environmental impacts.
In his article, João Teixeira de Freitas examines the role of the OECD National Contact Points (NCPs) in strengthening corporate environmental due diligence along the value chain.Footnote 25 NCPs are quasi-judicial bodies whose findings and recommendations are not legally binding, but their decisions nevertheless carry some authority when it comes to corporate compliance with the OECD Guidelines. The Guidelines, among others, specify how corporations should identify and assess adverse environmental impacts, a process that is related to, but also distinct from, local EIAs that companies regularly must carry out pursuant to national legislation. It is this interplay between the OECD due diligence requirements on identification and assessment and EIAs that is at the heart of the study by Teixeira de Freitas. Through a detailed investigation of 23 NCP statements, he finds that compliance with local EIA laws can help to demonstrate compliance with the OECD Guidelines, even though this may not be sufficient. What is required beyond EIAs is likely to be context-specific, though Teixeira de Freitas suggests that corporate adherence to internationally agreed standards is likely to help. Another question that arises is how companies can access the relevant information to identify and assess impact along the value chain, with some NCPs suggesting that companies can use their leverage in existing business relationships. Similar questions also increasingly come up in the context of EIAs, where courts are beginning to require project developers to incorporate the assessment of ‘remote’ climate impacts, such as the downstream emissions of fossil fuel projects.Footnote 26 Lastly, Teixeira de Freitas highlights how NCPs offer an opportunity for transnational litigation, which may open up new accountability channels, but may also lead to legal conflicts (for example, when the requirements from NCPs are at odds with national laws in a third country).
The start of the COVID-19 pandemic offered an example of how, through global mobility, diseases can spread rapidly across different countries. At the same time, the response to the pandemic demonstrated the importance of effective global cooperation in the development and distribution of vaccines. To strengthen preparedness for future pandemics, a new Pandemic Agreement was negotiated in the wake of COVID-19 under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO), and ultimately adopted in 2025.Footnote 27 Although the Agreement was adopted, it cannot enter into force for as long as countries do not reach agreement on the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) system, which was the most contested issue in the negotiations. The next article, by Michelle Rourke, Mark Eccleston-Turner, Fran Humphries, Stephanie Switzer, Abbie-Rose Hampton and Charles Lawson, offers a timely analysis of options for a multilateral access and benefit-sharing (ABS) system, building on experiences in existing international legal regimes.Footnote 28 In the Pandemic Agreement negotiations, parties’ views diverged significantly over the design of a PABS system, with high-income countries and pharmaceutical companies seeking to ‘delink’ and ‘decouple’ access to pathogens and associated data from benefit-sharing with the country providing access, and lower-income countries instead emphasizing the need to fairly share the benefits during a pandemic. Rourke and her co-authors carefully unpack the very notions of ‘delinking’ and ‘decoupling’, arguing that for the purposes of a multilateral ABS framework different categories can be distinguished. They examine these categories with reference to existing biodiversity and public health-related legal instruments, such as the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture,Footnote 29 the BBNJ High Seas Treaty,Footnote 30 and the WHO Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework.Footnote 31 First, ‘delinking’ could mean that the link between the country of origin of genetic resources and the country receiving the benefits is broken by pooling the benefits at the multilateral level. This, the authors note, might disincentivize countries from providing access to the genetic resources in the first place as well as create a ‘free-rider’ problem. A second form of ‘delinking’ would consist of breaking the connection between the specific genetic resources to which access is provided, and the type and quantity of benefits to be shared. The main problem here is that users of genetic resources may be disincentivized to participate in the multilateral system, instead resorting to bilateral ABS arrangements to gain access. Rourke and co-authors next demonstrate that there is a continuum of options for a multilateral ABS framework using the heuristic device of an ‘ABS Modalities Spectrum’. By offering conceptual clarity on the various options for ‘delinking’ access and benefit-sharing in a multilateral framework, the authors hope to inform the ongoing negotiations on the PABS system.
The next article by Ayşegül Buğra Şar offers another perspective on environmental regulation across space. Specifically, she examines how technological developments can create new legal challenges for old regimes, focusing on oil pollution caused by remote operators of (largely) autonomous ships.Footnote 32 Buğra Şar analyzes the options for applying the 1969 International Convention on Civil Liability for Oil Pollution DamageFootnote 33 (as amended in 1992Footnote 34) to such operators. Under this Convention, the rule is that owners are liable for oil spills, meaning that victims should seek recourse to these actors in the first place. Other parties are exempt from liability, unless they acted either recklessly or with a clear intent to cause damage, which is a high threshold. Following a discussion of the state of play on the international regulation of autonomous ships at the International Maritime Organization (IMO), Buğra Şar conducts a careful interpretive exercise of the Civil Liability Convention with a view to assessing whether remote operators fall within the scope of terms used in the Convention, including ‘servants or agents of the owner’, ‘crew’, and ‘operator’. She finds that national courts may end up with diverging interpretations of these various terms, which would create an undesirable situation of legal uncertainty. This uncertainty could not be fully addressed, Buğra Şar argues, by a unified interpretation by the IMO’s Legal Committee. Ultimately, she finds that the best option may be to shield remote operators from civil liability by including them among the exempted parties. She argues that remote operators may still be incentivized to protect the marine environment by recourse actions that the owner can undertake, as well as by criminal liability.
Connections across space are not confined to public environmental law. As Oren Perez and Ofir Stegmann show in their contribution to this issue, transnational private regulators in different parts of the world are also connected to each other.Footnote 35 Specifically, Perez and Stegmann offer a network perspective on the relationship between transnational private standard-setters on the one hand, and intergovernmental legal instruments and organizations on the other. The authors put forward four propositions, which find support in their empirical analysis of citations by private transnational standards. Firstly, they find that a significant number of such standards refer to international legal instruments. Secondly, they demonstrate that such references are made, to a large extent, with a view to grounding the normativity of the standard. Thirdly, they show how a handful of standards cite many international legal instruments, while private standard-setters draw on a narrow range of international legal instruments. Lastly, the authors highlight how citations to the same international legal instruments strengthens cohesion among private standards. Beyond the substantive findings of their analysis, Perez and Stegmann also exemplify how methodological approaches such as social network analysis can help to inform transnational environmental law scholarship.
3. Transnational Environmental Law across Time
Environmental law has developed numerous legal concepts and techniques to anticipate the future, including not just the notion of intergenerational equity but also the integration of scientific advice in decision-making, planning obligations, monitoring and review, and delegated lawmaking.Footnote 36 In her article, Veerle Heyvaert examines a legal technique that similarly seeks to overcome a temporal disconnect, namely what she terms ‘environmental target laws’.Footnote 37 Such laws generally include legally binding targets and timetables. A historical overview of targets in environmental law reveals that initially they were generally either open-ended, highly specific, or non-binding. With the advent of framework climate laws since the late 2000s, the setting of legally binding long-term targets (for example, net zero or carbon neutrality by 2050) has become more commonplace. However, also in other areas of environmental law – such as nature conservation, waste management, and air pollution – binding targets are emerging in jurisdictions like the EU and the United Kingdom. Heyvaert notes that setting long-term, legally binding targets represents an important shift in the mode of environmental governance. She argues that targets can help to overcome the short-term outlook driven by election cycles, making backtracking more difficult (though clearly not impossible). Moreover, environmental target laws focus on the positive environmental outcomes to be achieved, rather than the means through which to avoid negative environmental effects of economic activities.Footnote 38 In addition, the ‘headline’ nature of environmental targets means they can move environmental law out of obscurity and into the public eye. While Heyvaert thus constructs a strong defence for such laws, she is still mindful of their pitfalls. Target laws can be paralyzing, performative, and may become obsolete once a deadline approaches. To counter these risks, Heyvaert argues, governments need to plan for renewing targets, accompany targets with procedural requirements to ensure implementation, and provide for accountability.Footnote 39
One of the illustrative examples of environmental target laws provided in Heyvaert’s article, the EU Nature Restoration Regulation (NRR) of 2024,Footnote 40 is the subject of a more detailed analysis by Eleonora Ciscato and Matilde Meertens.Footnote 41 Specifically, their contribution to this issue examines the extent to which the NRR reflects different dimensions of justice and thereby can lead to ‘just ecological restoration’. The authors begin with an inquiry into the concept of ecological restoration, in which they highlight the social dimensions of the various interventions that can be subsumed within the concept. They then introduce the common – though by no means exhaustive – distinction between distributive, recognition, and procedural justice, which guides their analysis of (i) EU primary and secondary law in general, and (ii) the NRR. With regard to distributive justice (which comprises intergenerational fairness), Ciscato and Meertens note that the burden of achieving the Regulation’s collective target to restore ‘at least 20% of land areas and at least 20% of sea areas by 2030, and all ecosystems in need of restoration by 2050’Footnote 42 is unevenly distributed among both Member States and sectors (with agriculture, fishery, and forestry bearing the brunt of the burden). Moreover, they find the necessary financial support mechanisms for these sectors to be lacking. As for recognition justice, the authors express concern that marginalized communities will be sidelined at the expense of more (economically) powerful actors, as the Regulation does not provide effective mechanisms to make the voices of these communities heard. The analysis of procedural justice rests on the three pillars of the Aarhus Convention,Footnote 43 namely access to information, public participation, and access to justice. The NRR provides for access to information and public participation to some extent, with Member States required to monitor the state of nature and make such information publicly available, and with stakeholder engagement an important part of the development of Nature Restoration Plans. However, the Regulation falls short on access to justice, with a provision to this end being removed in the legislative process. The implementation of the Regulation in the coming years will show the extent to which these justice concerns can and will be addressed.
Intergenerational equity is a central part of the concept of sustainable development, commonly defined as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.Footnote 44 As such, the concept at first blush may seem well placed to help in overcoming temporal disconnects in environmental law. However, adding to a body of literature critical of the concept,Footnote 45 Elizabeth Macpherson and Rachael Mortiaux suggest that the concept has resulted in a simplistic, binary trade-off between (economic) development on the one hand, and environmental and cultural values on the other, with the former generally winning out.Footnote 46 They illustrate this argument with reference to the Fast-track Approvals Act 2024 in Aotearoa New Zealand, which provides opportunities for developers to obtain expedited approval for infrastructure or development projects that are deemed to have national or regional (economic) benefits, with environmental protection and respect for Indigenous interests relegated to discretionary considerations. Rather than simply critiquing the Act, Macpherson and Mortiaux offer a broader interrogation of the notion of sustainable development, which in their view enables extractive economic development to outweigh environmental protection as well as Indigenous rights and interests. As an alternative, the authors advocate a ‘third space’, a relational perspective that underscores the embeddedness of humans and their environment. This relational approach is common to many Indigenous natural resource governance models, including in Aotearoa New Zealand.
4. Conclusion
The interrelationship between actors across space and time raises important questions about the effectiveness and fairness of transnational environmental law. How can we design and implement trade measures that strengthen global environmental protection while giving due regard to the interests, cultures, and values of other countries and communities? What is the role of law in organizing global value chains to ensure not only that adverse environmental impacts are avoided, but also that overall global environmental improvements are brought about? How can transnational environmental law simultaneously accommodate an uncertain future and put in place mechanisms to ensure that this future is better off? What methodological advances are suitable to study the effects of transnational environmental law across time and space? We hope that the TEL community will continue to engage with these questions in future.
5. TEL Editorial Board Announcements
It is with great pleasure and gratitude that we share the positive news of TEL’s latest Impact Factor. In the 2025 Clarivate Journal Citation Reports (JCR), TEL’s two-year Impact Factor increased to 3.4 (5-yr Impact Factor 4.4). This confirms TEL’s position as the highest-ranking environmental law journal, as well as ranking 12th out of all 444 law journals featured in the 2025 JCR. Paired with continued increases in key usage metrics and other citation index rankings, these results speak volumes for the vibrant scholarly TEL community. We are deeply grateful for the tireless efforts of the entire TEL team, and especially to our authors, reviewers, and readers, whose contributions make TEL’s continued success possible.
