A Concise Research Agenda for Environmental Law

Abstract

If one could truly select a number of directions where research on environmental law, including its international dimensions, should focus in the future, the selection process would have to be based not only on an understanding of the state of the discipline, but more generally on an assessment, or at least a reasoned and informed opinion, of the state of the challenges faced by the discipline. And such challenges could not be more important or pressing than they are now. The terminology used to characterize such challenges varies, much like the examples, which abound, from catastrophic climate change or the sixth massive species extinction to the more mundane and humanly understandable air, water and soil pollution. Importantly, the sum of these impacts and their analysis as the combined human geological influence on the Earth System can now rely on the specific terminology of the Anthropocene, i.e. the proposed new epoch of the Geological Time Scale where humans are the defining force.1 Thus characterized, the challenge (the advent of the Anthropocene) and its various manifestations (from climate change to pollution) call, in my view, for two levels of responses, which, in turn, suggest relatively clear directions of research. The first and more basic level of response is the need to move from words to action. Environmental law, including international environmental instruments, is by now a very developed body of law. But it still suffers greatly from an implementation deficit, particularly on the international plane.2 As I shall discuss in section I of this short essay, research on environmental