INTRODUCTION: MULTILINGUALISM AND TERMINOLOGY PROBLEMS WITHIN THE EUROPEAN UNION

As is well known, one of the main features of the European Union (EU) is the recognition of integral multilingualism : the languages of all Member States are recognised as official languages of the EU. This figure currently stands at 24. Without going into detail, in a very general way it can be said that the recognition of multilingualism on the legal level implies that the treaties and legal acts of general application are drafted and published in all official languages.

Consequently, the multilingual character of EU law inevitably involves a high degree of complexity, together with relevant translation problems that are likely to increase with the accession of new Member States.

As we are speaking of legal rules, this complexity involves both language and legal problems, as each legal language mirrors a specific legal culture and consequently varies from one legal system to another. The problem is not only that of understanding EU legal rules, but rather, that of their uniform application in order to achieve an effective harmonisation of the laws of EU Member States, and not a merely nominal and apparent one. In fact, since the EU law-makers’ task should be to harmonise the laws of EU Member States, they should ensure a high degree of consistency between adopted legal provisions so that the latter can be interpreted in the same way and produce the same effects in all Member States.

However, although this seems of undoubted importance for achieving the ultimate goals of the European Union, it does not always occur as a consequence of a number of issues deriving from the drafting and implementation of EU legislation, such as, in particular, those related to legal terminology, interpretation and translation specific to the EU context.

Indeed, one central problem of multilingual legislation is that of terminology and translation of legal concepts, because of the conceptual differences between the various legal systems. Moreover, with regards to the EU, even though the legislature is necessarily multilingual, it cannot rely upon a common terminology at the European level. In addition, sometimes EU law-makers do not seem to be aware of the extensive differences that exist at a conceptual and terminological level within the European legal area.

THE CONFERENCE IN COMO

The sixth EELF Annual Conference was held at the University of Insubria in Como in September 2018. Attendance at the conference was high, as there were more the 140 participants and around 90 speakers and chairpersons.

The conference took a slightly different pattern from the previous European Environmental Law Forum conferences, which were devoted to more general topics, focusing on a more specific but at the same time crosscutting issue: environmental loss and damage.

As announced in the original call for papers, the book that we present here is a collection of peer-reviewed contributions of the speakers at the conference. The book reflects the structure of the conference and has the aim of analysing and comparing the regulation of environmental loss and damage in a comparative, interdisciplinary and both public- and private-law perspective. It delves into conceptual and specific legal issues related to liability, compensation and restoration of damage in different sectors and jurisdictions, also taking into account the contributions of economic analysis in this field of regulation. Specific attention has been devoted to the role that liability and insurance may play in terms of mitigation and adaptation to climate change, as well as the prevention of damage from natural hazards. The scope of analysis encompasses national as well as supranational and international regimes, also in view of possible legal transplants and “cross-fertilisation”. The book includes 30 contributions that are subdivided into eight parts: (i) liability for environmental harm in the EU; (ii) private and corporate environmental liability; (iii) the role of criminal liability; (iv) legal transplants in the environmental field: the case of environmental liability; (v) state and international environmental liability; (vi) climate change liability; (vii) liability, climate change and natural hazards: the role of insurance; and (viii) real compensation and offset regimes: the strategy of “no net loss”.

THE DIALECTIC BETWEEN GLOBAL LAW AND LOCAL LAW

One of the aspects that the conference aimed at underlining was the different keys to understanding the current dialectic between global and local law in the environmental field.

In recent decades, in fact, we have been witnessing the development of a body of rules that tends towards a progressive approach to the development of common operational choices in addressing environmental problems.

INTRODUCTION: SETTING THE SCENE

For several years now, climate change issues have been intensively debated within scientific and political contexts at both national and international level. Indeed, climate change is one of the most dramatic problems that current and future generations are called to address. Climate change is taking place at an unknown speed when compared with previous similar phenomena. Furthermore, it is caused mostly by human activities and, therefore, can be mitigated through regulatory and institutional solutions which affect human behaviour (mitigation strategy); and given that the increase in temperatures (global warming) inevitably results in changes to ecological cycles, changes in precipitation patterns, melting glaciers and rising sea levels, strategies to adapt to such results must be adopted (adaptation strategy).

Climate change has been the object of a complex international regulatory process, starting with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992 via the Kyoto Protocol of 2005 to the Paris Agreement of 2015. However, the international regulatory process has experienced its ups and downs in developing a global framework in order to identify the goals and the tools for addressing the challenge of climate change.

In addition, whilst climate change is a global phenomenon that needs to be addressed at a global level through comprehensive strategies agreed to at supranational level, the legal rules that are used to implement the strategies of mitigation and adaptation are necessarily rooted in local legal systems, a point that is often underestimated. In actual fact, the effective implementation of legal rules is largely dependent on the structural characteristics of each legal system, i.e. the underlying legal process. In this “global/local” dialectic, the legal and regulatory framework that has emerged is multilevel and highly fragmented, resulting from a variety of legal instruments – national, but also transnational – that are uncoordinated or at least poorly coordinated and have different levels of binding force and different geographical scope.

Indeed, although we have witnessed the development of an extensive international legal framework, there remain – among the different legal systems – different strategies for dealing with the risks posed by climate change.

From a global and comparative perspective, two different models of institutional response can be identified: the regulatory model aimed at directly regulating the problem, i.e. the causes and consequences of climate change and the measures to tackle them; and the litigation model, where climate-change- related issues are addressed through a judicial process.