Cumulative environmental harms pose pronounced challenges for human recognition, understanding, acceptance, and action. This chapter harvests insights across a wide range of disciplines to unpack the challenges involved in dealing with cumulative environmental problems. These insights point to a crucial role for well-crafted law and policy in responding to cumulative environmental problems. Analyzing cross-disciplinary insights about key challenges produces a framework of four integrated functions required for effective regulatory responses to cumulative environmental problems – the CIRCle Framework: (1) conceptualization: clearly and consistently conceptualizing the matter of concern that experiences cumulative impacts; (2) information: collecting, sharing, and analyzing information about environmental conditions, threats and benefits, rules and activities; (3) regulatory intervention: intervening to ensure cumulative impacts remain within an acceptable range; and (4) coordination among governments and stakeholders to undertake or contribute to the other functions.

Information is critical for understanding the conditions of what we care about and cumulative threats to it, so that we can design rules for intervention to protect or restore it. This is about more than just predicting cumulative impacts in the context of project-level environmental impact assessment. It requires gathering and aggregating, in an ongoing way, comprehensive, high-quality and shareable data and analysis, allocating and managing the costs of doing so, and ensuring that information is shared and can be accessed by governments, affected communities, and other stakeholders. Regulatory systems for addressing cumulative environmental problems should be information-makers rather than information-takers. Rules should actively shape the information that is produced, aggregated, analyzed, shared, and understood as legitimate to understand and respond to cumulative environmental problems. More than just a technical issue, information is about power and accountability for cumulative harm and responding to it – a critical influence on environmental democracy, environmental justice, and the rule of law. Real-world examples are provided of regulatory mechanisms that deal with information-related barriers to addressing cumulative environmental problems.

Chapter 2 explores the constitutive elements of global environmental governance. International environmental governance works when states fulfill the commitments they undertake under international law, such as the obligation to exchange information on transboundary environmental risks and impacts and the duty to notify and consult with other states with regard to such risks and impacts. Mechanisms of global environmental governance include also environmental impact assessments and strategic impact assessments. The chapter examines, furthermore, how the monitoring, control, and surveillance (MCS) of compliance with international environmental obligations has been modernized by the wide application of technologies. It explores whether green democracy has become a universal aspirational principle, and how the system for the protection of human rights has been used as a tool for the protection of the environment, lending support to the emergence of a right to a healthy environment. Whether nature, as a legal entity, should be accorded rights and have a say on the development plans of states is also analyzed.

Cumulative environmental impacts are a central problem that contemporary environment-related laws must face, from laws that allocate natural resources such as forests and water, to rights-based approaches to nature and human health. This introduction sketches the basic characteristics of a cumulative environmental problem – accumulating, incremental harms at different scales, caused by many and diverse actors, with the added complexity of interacting and uncertain effects addressed by multiple legal regimes. It explains why addressing cumulative environmental problems requires reaching across disciplines, legal contexts, and jurisdictions. The CIRCle Framework is introduced - a Framework of four integrated functions of formal rules for responding to cumulative environmental problems – conceptualization, information, regulatory intervention, and coordination. The chapter also introduces case studies of laws addressing environmental justice concerns related to groundwater in the Central Valley of California, cumulative harms to the biodiversity of the Great Barrier Reef, Australia, and cumulative impacts to grasslands as biocultural landscapes in South Tyrol, Italy.

This chapter provides a bird’s eye view of the landscape of laws that can deliver the CIRCle Framework functions of conceptualization, information, regulatory intervention, and coordination to address cumulative environmental problems. Its scope is broad, covering traditional and customary laws; environmental impact assessment and strategic environmental assessment; natural resources, land use planning, conservation, pollution, and other environment-related laws; and broader areas of public law, including constitutional environmental rights. It also discusses the way international treaties and development bank policies deal with cumulative impacts. The chapter provides a simple compass for navigating this landscape: considering whether the dominant focus of the law is a matter of concern that is threatened by cumulative impacts (e.g., environmental justice, national parks), impacts (e.g., environmental impact assessment, water pollution), or activities (e.g., road construction, mining), or whether it instead indirectly influences a cumulative environmental problem (e.g., laws for intergovernmental coordination).

Chapter 3 identifies the distinct but intertwined principles of sustainable development that particularly found resonance in the IFIs. It discusses the posited link between the two, with public participation serving as the procedural component of sustainable development, which in substance requires the integration of environmental, social, and economic concerns. The proceduralization of the concept is analyzed in relation to similar trends in international environmental law, international human rights law, and international economic (trade and investment) law.

This chapter argues that such judicialisation before the ICJ has not developed international environmental law in a way favourable to victims of environmental degradation. It first observes that certain promising human rights-focused environmental disputes were discontinued, indicating that other forms of peaceful dispute settlement remain significant in the environmental context. It then argues that raising arguments in certain incidental proceedings in environmental disputes, such as counterclaims, have limited the potential for certain decisions to develop peoples’ rights in environmental disputes. Finally, it argues that the Court’s perceived judicial caution has limited its ability to clarify the role of local populations in environmental impact assessments (EIAs) and develop certain environmental principles in light of populations, such as the precautionary principle or the principle of intergenerational equity.

The Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is a powerful tool for assessing future projects and initiatives to avoid their negative consequences on biodiversity and the environment in the early stages. To examine how project developers and planners can maximize the full value of EIAs to manage biodiversity risks in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, this chapter evaluates the adverse impacts of three major projects on the biodiversity of the Tigris and Euphrates river basin: the Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi (GAP) project in Türkiye; the Tropical Water Projects in Iran; and drainage projects in Iraq. The chapter illustrates how the lack of a comprehensive EIA in water projects on the Tigris and Euphrates river basin has had diverse and adverse consequences on the environment and biodiversity of the basin. The chapter then provides insights into how the EIA could be enhanced in current and future developments in the basin by improving legal frameworks at the national level, increasing institutional capability and integrating technological advancement into the EIA.

In several Latin American countries, the state has to consult impacted Indigenous communities before approving new hydrocarbon and mining development, in accordance with regulations that govern these “prior consultation” processes. However, when navigated by extractivist states, these formal norms have blocked the very participation they were intended to encourage and have facilitated state disregard of both Indigenous territorial rights and the environmental destruction caused by large-scale development. These unanticipated outcomes stem from the measures the state must take to determine whether a hydrocarbon or mining project directly impacts an Indigenous community and therefore requires prior consultation. To make this determination, the state must define lands to which Indigenous communities hold rights, and the area impacted by the proposed development. State agencies that are eager to approve new extraction have overlooked – and in some cases actively dismissed – both the impacts of mining and hydrocarbons, and the geographical reach of Indigenous authority, in contexts in which communities claim, but lack title to damaged lands. This chapter demonstrates how prior consultation has encouraged the state to overlook, and even actively deny, Indigenous territorial rights and environmental impacts of extraction through analysis of three important Indigenous mining and hydrocarbon conflicts in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru.

The intersection between energy and the environment is regulated on the basis of legal foundations that international economic law has developed on its own or ‘borrowed’ from (or otherwise relied on) such outside regimes as general international law and international environmental law. The borrowed principles, like sovereignty over natural resources or sustainable development, can find their reflection, directly or indirectly, in trade and investment agreements and case law and will continuously affect new developments in this field. This chapter will show that such foundations stemming from the external sources define the basic contours of State’s rights and duties associated with the energy–environment nexus. Moreover, the international trading and investment systems provide self-created legal foundations for environmental policy space as will also be discussed in this chapter. They define the extent to which energy-related restrictive measures driven by environmental considerations can be accepted. The case of the ECT presented at the end of this chapter is a striking example for demonstrating that the legal foundations are not static and may undergo important changes.

This chapter finds that the ISA defines ‘marine environment’ broadly and imposes a threshold requirement – ‘serious harm’ – to the definition of ‘marine environmental damage’ in DSM. It argues that the determination of whether the threshold has been crossed should be based on both factual assessment and value judgment. The measure of marine environmental damage in DSM is a much more complex issue. This chapter draws on experience in other contexts, including the International Oil Pollution Compensation Funds, the ‘F4’ claims before the United Nations Compensation Commission, the US and EU laws and practice and discussions in the context of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Upon examination, it proposes to rely primarily on a cost-based method, while valuation of pure environmental damage or interim loss secondary. It suggests a two-step pattern for measuring environmental damage in DSM.