The quest for a ‘global’ environmental law

"THE QUEST FOR A ‘GLOBAL’ ENVIRONMENTAL LAW"
A seminar by Elena Cima

>International environmental law, as evidenced by the fact that the environment is continuing to deteriorate at an ever-increasing speed, has been unable to adequately tackle the global environmental challenges of the century. Loss of biodiversity, climate change, water governance crises are just a few examples of the problem.

This ‘inability’ may be traced back to a series of shortcomings, deficiencies, or gaps of the existing international environmental law framework. In particular, many—if not all—of its core principles seem to lack clarity, certainty, and predictability. It was precisely to address these shortcomings that the Global Pact for the Environment was launched in 2017 as an initiative to systematize the foundations of international environmental regulation in a single binding instrument. And the draft of the Global Pact does contain all the relevant environmental law principles, clarifying their meaning, content, and status.

The story of the Global Pact, however, since its inception in the ‘Environment Commission’ of the Club des Juristes, has unveiled more profound limits of international environmental law as it currently exists, revealing its inadequacy to reflect and capture the many changes that are occurring as a result of the forces of globalization. For international environmental law to become truly ‘global’, as the Pact suggests, international environmental law itself needs to be rethought and reconceptualized. It is necessary to depart from the traditional distinctions between international and domestic law, between private and public authority, and between what is and what is not a prerogative of the State, to embrace new normative arrangements that transcend this conventional vision and would allow the international environmental legal regime to evolve into a global system. And only the reconceptualization of environmental law in such a global perspective could foster the realization of the right to a clean and sustainable environment which still struggles for universal recognition.

Elena Cima is a Lecturer in International Energy and Environmental Law at the University of Geneva. She holds a PhD in International Law from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva, a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Milan and an LL.M degree from Yale Law School, where she was editor of the Yale Journal of International Law. She also teaches short courses on environmental law, green industrial policy and sustainability at the University of Eastern Finland and at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, and supervises an environmental law clinic at the LLM in Public International Law at IHEID. She has recently published a monograph with Brill entitled From Exception to Promotion: Rethinking the Relationship between International Trade and Environmental Law , and has published in several peer-reviewed journals on international environmental law, as well as on the interface between international environmental law and trade, investment, human rights and energy law.

Invite-only event.