Lawyer Monthly Magazine - September 2021 Edition

BY 1990 THERE WERE ONLY 35 LAWS RELATED TO CLIMATE CHANGE WORLDWIDE By 1990 there were only 35 laws related to climate change worldwide, owing to a lack of awareness of the issue at that time. Consequently, almost all climate change laws currently in effect have been passed within the last three decades. The 1.5°C figure quoted above formed a key part of the negotiations of the 2015 Paris Agreement, wherein a number of nations – including several low-lying islands – successfully pushed for that temperature increase to be set as a target in the deal, arguing that allowing a greater increase would threaten their survival. The Agreement requires all supporting countries to set pledges to reduce their carbon emissions, with the aim of keeping the global average temperature from rising above 2°C and “pursuing efforts” to limit it to 1.5°C (temperatures having already risen above 1°C). Signatories are expected to assess their progress towards implementing these requirements through a “global stockade”, the first of which is planned for 2023. The Paris Agreement followed on the heels of a marked acceleration in climate change legislation from the 1990s onwards, which reached a peak between 1999 and 2014 when more than 120 laws related to climate change were passed each year. Yet, as the findings of the IPCC report have demonstrated, the creation of these laws has not been sufficient to shift the global emissions trajectory towards a sustainable level. A 2020 study of panel data on the legislative activity of 133 nations found that climate change laws enacted between 1996 and 2016 reduced global CO2 emissions by the equivalent of one year’s worth of carbon output. While impressive when taken alone, this rate of progress will not come close to reducing emissions to the level necessary to meet the Paris Agreement’s target of a 1.5°C total increase. Climate experts also broadly agree that the Paris Agreement by itself is insufficient to achieve the climate change targets it has set. Though the Agreement was legally binding, its signatory nations set their own emissions reduction targets, and there is no enforcement mechanism to ensure their adherence. A tracker designed by German non-profits Climate Analytics and NewClimate Institute estimates that current climate change policies would result in a 2.9°C rise by 2100, or 2.6°C should all governments fully enact the pledges that they have made so far under the Agreement. The progress made by individual nations in regards to climate change is predictably sporadic. In the US, the Supreme Court holds that the EPA has the authority and obligation to regulate greenhouse gas emissions pursuant to the Clean Air Act, yet the Supreme Court has also mostly struck down the greenhouse gas regulations that the EPA has attempted to implement in the past. The Clean Air Act itself was last amended in 1990 and is widely agreed to be unsuited to the regulation of greenhouse gases, though the current deadlock in Congress leaves either its updating or the acceptance of a more suitable bill a matter of speculation. Meanwhile, member states of the EU officially adopted the European Green Deal project on 14 July, introducing a raft of policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions by 55% as of 2030 and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 through the use of roughly €1 trillion of investments. The Green Deal focuses on encouraging businesses to adopt sustainability measures, but also includes a bundle of further initiatives such as the European Climate Law, enshrining the bloc’s 2050 net-zero emissions target among other anti-climate change measures. Though hailed as a landmark climate law, the deal has faced significant political opposition on the grounds that it was not ambitious enough to tackle the threat of climate change. WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM 28 HOW HAS CLIMATE CHANGE LEGISLATION DEVELOPED OVER TIME? CURRENT EFFORTS TO TACKLE THE THREAT