This insightful book considers how the law has adapted to the environmental challenges of the 21st Century and the ways in which it might be used to cope with environmental risks and uncertainties whilst promoting resilience and greater equality. These issues are considered in social context by contributors from different disciplines who examine some of the experiments tried in different parts of the world to govern the environment, improve the available legal tools and give voice to more diverse groups.

This cutting-edge book considers the functional inseparability of risk and innovation within the context of environmental law and governance. Analysing both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ innovation, the book argues that approaches to socio-ecological risk require innovation in order for society and the environment to become more resilient.

This comprehensive Research Handbook is the first study to link law and Earth system science through the epistemic lens of the planetary boundaries framework. It critically examines the legal and governance aspects of the framework, considering not only each planetary boundary, but also a range of systemic issues, including the ability of law to keep us within the planetary boundaries’ safe operating space.

Regulation of Risk provides comprehensive insight into regulation of risk in transport, trade and environment. Contributions provide national, regional and international perspectives on pressing questions: How is risk conceived in light of novel technological deployment, climate change, political upheaval, evolving geopolitics, and the COVID-19 pandemic? What legal tools such as contractual frameworks and governance structures are available to manage the changing landscape of risk? This book highlights the importance of dialogue and collaborative decision-making on risk between policymakers, institutions, societal stakeholders and the scientific community.

Focusing on systemic risks caused by climate change, this book examines how these risks can be effectively regulated to ensure resilience and avoid catastrophe. Systemic risks are risks that threaten the systems upon which society depends, including ecosystems, social systems, financial systems, and systems of infrastructure. Such risks are typically characterised by inherent complexity, profound uncertainty, and overwhelming ambiguity. In combination, these features pose significant regulatory challenges for policy and law-makers. Examining how different types of systemic risks caused by climate change are being regulated in four different jurisdictions – the EU, the UK, the US and Australia – this book identifies deficiencies associated with regulating systemic risks using a traditional approach, based on a linear relationship between risk and regulation, which is widely used to regulate risk. The book advances a regulatory approach that is, instead, founded on the concept of "risk governance". This involves a structured yet flexible, holistic, interdisciplinary and inclusive basis for responding to systemic risks; and it is, this book argues, a more effective basis for regulating systemic risks given their uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. This book will appeal to academics, policy and law-makers and practitioners working at the intersection of law and policy in the areas of regulation, risk management and climate change.

Challenging historic assumptions about human relationships with nature, Jan G. Laitos examines how environmental laws have addressed environmental problems in the past, and the reasons for the laws' inability to successfully prevent environmental contamination and alterations of critical environmental systems. This forward-thinking book offers a creative and organic alternative to traditional but ultimately unsuccessful environmental rules. It explains the need for a new generation of environmental laws grounded in the universal laws of nature which might succeed where past and current approaches have largely failed.

Despite contrasting approaches, democratic and authoritarian governments all underline the fact that environmental protection is crucial and inevitable—and China’s enthusiasm in stepping up its efforts to protect the environment has not gone unnoticed. This book highlights how the consensual orchestration of sustainability in China’s biggest city, Shanghai, affects non-state actors’ ways of perceiving, acting, and organizing around environmental issues. China’s Green Consensus examines grassroots realities as they intersect with events of everyday life, offering insights into areas that far transcend debates over coercive forms of environmentalism and exploring the “soft” and “green” facets of President Xi Jinping’s authoritarian approach to governance. The importance of environmental protection in people’s lives serves as a lens to analyze and understand authoritarian adaptations to environmental global phenomena. Arantes highlights how, through mobilization and (de)politicization, a “green” consensus leads to the displacement of state responsibilities and the cultivation of civil society in its own image. In so doing, she opens up new ways of thinking about the complexities of environmental governance, consensus politics, subject making, and citizenship in authoritarian contexts. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Chinese society and politics, environmental politics, political ecology, international relations, and urbanization in Asia, as well as all others interested in the rising appeal of authoritarianism around the globe.

Global risks present formidable challenges to international law. Although they have long been identified in many other scientific disciplines, they are currently only considered on a sectoral basis in international law in the absence of a legal definition. The aim of this book is threefold: to identify the main elements that characterise global risks in a legal perspective, to determine the characteristics that make them a new category of risk, and to analyse the changes they bring about in the main mechanisms of international law. Drawing on the relationship between international law and other legal systems, and in particular national law, this book highlights possible responses to the challenges posed by global risks. The study is based on extensive practice related to the examples of climate change and pandemics, but opens up perspectives on conclusions that could be common to other global risks, such as financial risks or cyber risks.

The Elgar Encyclopedia of Environmental Sociology serves as a repository of insight on the complex interactions, challenges and potential solutions that characterize our shared ecological reality. Presenting innovative thinking on a comprehensive range of topics, expert scholars, researchers, and practitioners illuminate the nuances, complexities and diverse perspectives that define the continually evolving field of environmental sociology.