International Environmental Law

Governors Present Bold Vision for Investing in a New Forest Economy

As global leaders gather in Cali for COP16 and devastating fires continue across the Amazon, we should look to subnational groups for solutions to both the climate and biodiversity loss crisis.

The world has continued to watch as fires burn – yet again – across much of the Amazon basin. With historic droughts and ongoing lack of resources to tackle these fires and their underlying causes, they have ravaged millions of hectares of forests, communities, and wildlife habitat in Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, and beyond. These fires, …

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Earth system tipping events now seem inevitable – what does this mean for climate governance?

Graphical representation of potential climate and social tipping points report 2023

Building meaningful earth system governance creates multiple new research challenges

A tipping point is a system threshold beyond which change becomes self-perpetuating until a qualitatively different stable state is reached. For example a rainforest turns into a grassland, or an ice sheet melts completely. Such shifts are non-linear, and practically irreversible. Fears that growing human impacts might push aspects of the global climate past such …

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China, Climate, and Clean Energy

China seems to have leap-frogged the U.S. on clean energy.  We need to catch up.

In 2023, China accounted for about 60% of the world’s additions of solar and wind power, and of electric vehicles. The U.S. will need to make a major effort to catch up. Otherwise, we risk being shut out of important global markets and giving China an opening to influence developing countries.

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Rightwing Authoritarianism vs the Environment

In the U.S. and elsewhere, rightwing authoritarians oppose climate action. That’s not a coincidence.

Project 2025 favors authoritarian presidential rule. It also wants to destroy environmental regulation, especially climate law. That’s not a coincidence.  The combination of authoritarianism, extreme conservative ideology, and anti-environmentalism is common globally, not just in U.S. politics. There’s no logical connection between a belief in authoritarian government, upholding traditional hierarchies, and views about protecting the …

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Is 2025 the Year of the Carbon Tax?

Regulating inside the fenceline

Carbon border adjustment mechanisms are increasingly the talk of Washington. UCLA Law’s Kimberly Clausing explains some of the options on the table.

There’s a big, important tax debate looming next year—one with opportunities and risks for climate policy, particularly the idea of a carbon tax. It can be hard to see this debate thanks to the daily churn of the 2024 presidential election, but it’s there on the horizon if you squint. For one thing, we’ll likely …

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Counting the Climate Costs of Warfare

There are calls for nations to disclose their military-related greenhouse gas emissions as researchers try to tally the climate impacts of war in Ukraine and Gaza.

What if I told you that nations around the world were ignoring a significant amount of their greenhouse gas emissions by omitting an entire dirty sector from their tally? Would you be horrified? Would you want to close that loophole so that parties to international agreements are required to report these hidden emissions as part …

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Pouring Gas on a Five Alarm Fire

That’s Trump’s climate policy in a nutshell. His campaign slogan should be, “Burn, Baby, Burn.”

At a dinner for oil industry CEOs last week, Trump promised to fulfill the industry’s every dream in return for a billion dollars in donations.  We urgently need now is more federal climate action, not less. Yet the reelection of Donald Trump would wipe out years of federal climate action.  It’s important to understand fully …

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How the ICC is Using International Criminal Law to Prosecute Suspects of Eco Crimes

Guest contributor Aria Burdon Dasbach writes that the International Criminal Court is in the process of weighing dozens of suggestions for how to go after global environmental crimes.

There are many different ways that our global society has attempted to address environmental damage and climate change. We fund climate technology startups. We elect representatives that keep the climate in mind. We start nonprofits dedicated to reestablishing our collective sustainable relationships with earth systems. And we litigate in civil and federal courts at the …

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Power of the People: Environmental Advocacy in China

Several of China’s most prominent environmental advocates will join a keynote talk at UCLA Law on the role of civil society in addressing China’s global environmental impacts.

China’s global rise has raised concerns about impacts on the environment in a bewilderingly wide range of issues. These include global climate change, deforestation, impacts on rare and endangered species, harm to fisheries, environmental impacts of overseas infrastructure, mining, and energy sector investments, to name just a few. Popular attention has often focused on Chinese …

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Climate Change and Nigeria

A population explosion. Sluggish economy. Weak governance. Serious climate impacts. What could possibly go wrong?

By the time my youngest granddaughter is thirty, Nigeria will be the world’s third-largest country. It’s also one of the countries that’s least prepared to adapt to climate change, which will be much worse by then. Nigeria’s population is expected to roughly double by 2050, to around 400 million.  The population was previously expected to …

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