This article asks whether the abandonment of drifting fish aggregating devices (dFADs) is illegal under international marine pollution law. To answer this question, it provides a brief overview of the general international legal framework for the protection of the marine environment as well as specific legal regimes, namely the London Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter (LC), its 1996 Protocol (LP), and Annex V of the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL). The article concludes that the abandonment of dFADs contravenes the LC/LP and/or, depending on the preferred interpretation, MARPOL Annex V. The decision as to which of the two regimes is applicable depends on whether dFAD abandonment can be classified as ‘incidental to, or derived from the normal operations of vessels … and their equipment’ or not. The negligent loss of dFADs always violates MARPOL Annex V. The article also shows that certain state practice and opinio juris suggests a parallel applicability of the two regimes with respect to deliberate dFAD abandonment. While such a development would ensure more comprehensive coverage of the relevant standards and prohibitions, a clear regulatory decision as to which of the two regimes is the correct one would be preferable from an implementation and enforcement perspective.

Floods are not merely ‘natural’ disasters; rather, they emerge as socio-natural phenomena shaped by political, social, and economic processes. Law plays a pivotal role in producing and sustaining these processes and contributes to the creation of unjust environments. Drawing on political ecology and environmental history, this article analyzes the role of law and its interactions with colonialism and capitalism in the Damodar river valley in Eastern India. The Damodar river valley is an intensely engineered and hazardous region, a site of multiple interventions and developmental and ecological experiments for over a century. Colonial and post-colonial legacies have left a lasting imprint on legal, policy, and institutional frameworks, establishing a path-dependent trajectory for addressing future climate change adaptation challenges. While focusing on a specific case study, the article's approach and findings have broader significance, especially in the context of climate adaptation. The central argument underscores the need to understand the political and legal dimensions of flooding, and reinforces the need for a shift beyond incremental adjustments that do not tackle the underlying structures that produce the injustices associated with floods. It highlights the importance of ‘transformative adaptation’ approaches that address the root causes of climate-related disasters, such as restructuring power relations between actors, reconfiguring governance structures, and scrutinizing ideologies that mediate how water is used and distributed.

In civil law jurisdictions, plants have traditionally been classified as ‘objects’ (or ‘things’) under private law, reflecting an age-old tendency, certainly in the Western world, to underestimate and undervalue plants. Recent legal debates increasingly acknowledge the special nature of plants. Perhaps the most eye-catching debate in this context is the one on Rights of Nature, which have much potential but pose some practical and conceptual challenges. We propose an additional way of acknowledging the special nature of plants in a legal context: de-objectifying plants in private law and thereby explicating that they are not mere objects. Numerous civil codes already separate animals from objects, often – though not exclusively – based on the sentience of animals. Recent scientific research suggests that plants may be sentient, too. We aim to open the debate on the de-objectification of plants, based on their sentience, in civil codes as a feasible and unobtrusive way to acknowledge in law that plants are living beings, and more than mere things.

Climate policies are often evaluated using criteria that are heterogeneous and misaligned with the stated aims of these policies. By combining legal research methods with insights from economic theory, we systematically map and analyze the legal objectives of the European Union (EU) Emissions Trading System (ETS), a key climate policy instrument. We find that the EU ETS is shaped by a nuanced internal normative framework, the principal goal of which is emissions reduction, combined with three secondary goals of cost-effectiveness, economic efficiency and equity, and a meta-goal of coherence. Based on the contents and interrelations of these legal objectives, we formulate evaluation criteria that can be used to critically analyze and evaluate the EU ETS performance in a more comprehensive, transparent, and comparable manner. The resulting methodology is applicable to other environmental policies and jurisdictions.

Hydrogen is playing an increasingly important role in China's energy and climate policy, with significant implications for the development of a global hydrogen industry. However, China's approach to the regulation of hydrogen, and, in particular, the role of local authorities in promoting hydrogen refuelling stations and fuel cell vehicles, has so far received limited scholarly attention. This article aims to contribute to the literature on hydrogen regulation and to the transnational environmental law scholarship on decentralization by examining how China promotes hydrogen at the national and local levels. The case of China shows how, in jurisdictions with a sufficient degree of decentralization, local initiatives can play a key role in driving the development of hydrogen. By testing different approaches to hydrogen regulation, local experimentation helps to manage the uncertainties associated with this new energy source. At the same time, China's experience confirms the ‘environmental federalism’ theory on the importance of regulatory harmonization to reduce transaction costs and local protectionism. As the Chinese government develops its national regulatory approach on hydrogen, it has the opportunity to take into account both local and international experience and engage with other major economies in an effort to promote an internationally harmonized regulatory landscape.

In recent years, some scientists have called for research into and potential development of ‘solar geoengineering’ technologies as an option to counter global warming. Solar geoengineering refers to a set of speculative techniques to reflect some incoming sunlight back into space, for example, by continuously spraying reflective sulphur aerosols into the stratosphere over several generations. Because of the significant ecological, social, and political risks posed by such technologies, many scholars and civil society organizations have urged governments to take action to prohibit the development and deployment of solar geoengineering techniques. In this article we take such calls for a prohibitory or a non-use regime on solar geoengineering as a starting point to examine existing international law and governance precedents that could guide the development of such a regime. The precedents we examine include international prohibitory and restrictive regimes that impose bans or restrictions on chemical weapons, biological weapons, weather modification technologies, anti-personnel landmines, substances that deplete the ozone layer, trade in hazardous wastes, deep seabed mining, and mining in Antarctica. We also assess emerging norms and soft law in anticipatory governance of novel technologies, such as human cloning and gene editing. While there is no blueprint for a solar geoengineering non-use regime in international law, our analysis points to numerous specific elements on which governments could draw to constrain or impose an outright prohibition on the development of technologies for solar geoengineering, should they opt to do so.

The rationale behind state support for, and obedience to, normative rules and obligations has long been a topic of international law scholarship discourse. What has yet to be fully established, however, is why virtually all states have agreed to adhere to a seemingly novel global paradigm with ambitious yet non-binding objectives – the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This article identifies six factors as contributing to the influencing power of the SDGs – namely, the role of law, particularly inter- and transnational law, the legitimacy of the framework, the notion of reciprocity, reputational concerns, national self-interest, and the moral duty to address the shared global challenges of sustainable development.

By exploring their strengths and limitations through several theoretical frameworks (including Harold Koh's theory of transnational legal processes, Thomas Franck's theory of legitimacy, and Ryan Goodman and Derek Jinks’ three mechanisms of social influence), this article argues that the combination of these factors motivates voluntary state commitment, reporting, and cooperation under the SDG framework and that, overall, the SDGs offer a versatile lens to explore the different motives for state adherence to a soft law framework in the inter- and transnational legal spheres.

Reflexive environmental law (REL) enables an understanding of how law builds potential for private company reflexivity. Reflexivity helps to avoid lock-in, and enhances learning and self-organization to resolve complex sustainability challenges. Thus far, REL theory has excluded traditional command-and-control regulation as a form of REL. This limits the potential of REL to understand how legislation can drive reflexivity and create more effective governance. Our framework expands the definition of REL and sets out six types of regulatory instrument found in legislation that may, or may not, constitute forms of REL. The framework comprises three reflexive drivers – autonomy, accountability, and adjustability – and, under these, eleven REL techniques. Through examples taken from European environmental legislation, we explain the drivers’ relationship with different regulatory instruments. This taxonomy empowers regulators and scholars to understand both the reflexive potential of regulatory instruments and the possibility to make instruments more reflexive in specific contexts.