The lawfulness of carbon border adjustment measures (CBAMs) under general international economic law and particular economic agreements is explored; specifically, if their international lawfulness can be determined by thinking of them as countermeasures necessary to implement climate change obligations. As there are no non-discriminatory obligations under customary international law, it is argued that CBAMs are lawful under general international law, but under particular international economic agreements they can be seen as countermeasures lawfully taken in response to breaching the obligation to curb GHG emissions, allowing their justification as a breach of primary non-discriminatory economic obligations, particularly the national treatment principle under the GATT and GATS. This shifts the burden of proving necessity/proportionality to the State in breach of the obligation. CBAMs are fundamentally lawful measures and can only give rise to compensation if it they are unnecessary/disproportionate. This chapter also assesses whether they can be thought of as erga omnes contractantes obligations under international economic agreements, particularly the GATT and the GATS.

It is, by now, beyond dispute that climate change presents the single greatest environmental challenge of our times. It is equally likely that this challenge will only be met by sustained and iterative cycles of global policy formation, administrative rule-making, regulatory action, and impact assessment. The second and third of these steps, broadly speaking, constitute the process of policy implementation. While the scholarly study of policy implementation is not new, it has yet to receive serious attention in the area of climate change regulation. The reasons for this are relatively simple.

First, the policy formation stage is still ongoing. As the recent meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Dubai vividly demonstrates, major outstanding disagreements on the basic structure of global climate policy remain.1

A comparative analysis of worldwide climate policies, taking the European Green Deal as a yardstick, shows only a limited degree of convergence. While the European Union (EU), the United States, Japan and People’s Republic of China (PRC) have set between 2050 and 2060 as a time limit to achieve climate neutrality, global practices aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to their implications are still largely ineffective and unco-ordinated. Despite significant efforts, rather than displaying a harmonious framework, climate policies spanning the EU, the United States, PRC, Latin America, Middle East, Asia-Pacific, and Africa appear as a fragmented patchwork. This is true not only from the standpoint of external relations, comparing and contrasting the policy of different States and sovereign entities, but also internally, owing to such divisions as polycentric regulatory powers in federal States; asymmetric interests in geopolitical blocs such as the East, West, and Middle East; and different degrees of social cohesion in developing countries.

Can ‘digitalisation’ (the process of running business through procedures that take place in digital format) contribute to the green transition? If so, to what extent? The European Union (EU) has recently embraced the idea of synergically combining climate policies and digitalisation, whereby the digital transformation becomes a key tool to achieve net zero carbon emissions. Arguably, while there are manifold advantages in improving, for instance, energy distribution via smart grids, digitalisation also contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. It is therefore necessary to strike the right balance and understand how to best harness digitalisation to implement the green transition. Notably, it is essential that the EU monitor the impact of digitalisation on the overall energy demand to avoid an excessive increase in energy consumption. Arguably, the EU can profitably couple a holistic embracement of digitalisation as the panacea to climate challenges with a ‘learn-by-doing’ approach, setting a variety of real-world experiments across supply chains to test the viability of its digital policy, in close collaboration with stakeholders.

Russia is one of the main oil and gas producers and one of the biggest emitters of carbon dioxide globally. Its energy policies are still underpinned by the necessity of establishing ‘spheres of influence’ and are not on track to achieve the objectives of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement. Politically, war in Ukraine is arguably a consequence of this approach and discloses for the European Union (EU) the possibility of a diversification of its energy sources to achieve security of supply, which unlocks the opportunity of accelerating the green transition envisaged in the European Green Deal. Legally, given that they are not at war with Russia, the EU and its Member States could invoke the energy supply crisis and the political misalignment between the Russian energy policy and the Green Deal, rather than war per se, as a justification to abandon consolidated long-term energy contracts and accelerate the green transition.

While most sovereign entities have committed to greening their economies and investment under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), several of them are also bound by obligations contracted under the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), which protects investors in renewables and fossil fuel alike. Arguably, such a situation triggers a ‘regulatory clash’ that has the potential to impede the implementation of net zero carbon policies, such as the European Green Deal. This contribution contextualises the ECT within the framework of the UNFCCC and scopes the potential conflict between such regulatory regimes. Particularly, in light of the so-called ‘sunset’ clause, the contribution concludes that a suitable avenue to resolve the clash is establishing a preferential track for investment in clean energy under the ECT. On this basis, fundamental solutions are envisaged for greening investment, by applying model de lege ferenda proposals for a substantive and procedural modernisation of the ECT.

The Polar ice caps shrink, ocean currents change, sea level rises and trees flower sooner than expected. Although scientific evidence proves that, owing to anthropogenic activities,1 air temperature is on track to increase beyond 2°C above pre-industrial levels by 2084 (Wang et al., 2018, p. 761) and the time window for addressing the problem is fast shrinking (IPCC, 2018, p. 112; IPCC, 2021, p. 8), all UNFCCC Conferences of the Parties have thus far failed to establish an effective regulatory system. There are indeed States that emit 6,457 million metric tons of CO2 per year (Ritchie & Roser, 2019, CO2 Emissions Per Capita), causing the polar regions to warm twice as fast as the rest of the world (Year of Polar Prediction, 2017).