The Emergence of New Rights and New Modes of Adjudication in Transnational Environmental Law
The year 2015 ended on a euphoric note for many in the environmental law community. The climate negotiations in Paris (France) in late November and December, proceeding in the face of tragic terrorist attacks in that city only weeks before, yielded an historic agreement that may well serve as the international baseline for decades to come. We suspect that some will regard the 21 session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as a belated victory for old style international law. Yet the final agreement is far from old style, for the parties relinquished the insistence, so manifestly present at COP 20 in Copenhagen (Denmark) on binding emissions reduction targets and rigorous enforcement mechanisms. What COP 21 has produced instead is scaffolding upon which states must supply nationally determined contributions (NDCs) established in a transparent, multilevel fashion. The Paris Agreement thus represents a different and more optimistic way forward, and one that relies deeply on the augmentation of alternative approaches to environmental governance. Discussions concerning precisely these alternative approaches have filled the pages of this journal during its formative years. On that note, we gratefully pause to recognize that 2016 is TEL's fifth anniversary year. Since its launch TEL has published rigorous and challenging pieces on topics ranging from climate change adaptation law and regulatory convergence in nanotechnology governance to the legality of a meat carbon tax. That TEL fills an important niche in environmental
Transnational Environmental Law