# Giving New Impetus to Environmental Law **Date de l'événement :** 09/11/2025 * Publié le 09/11/2025 ### Date 01/11/2025 ## Chapô **During the 1970s, environmental law burst into the legal world like a rocket reaching orbit in record time. Today, judging by the number of courses and degrees devoted to it, the environment has become a branch of law in its own right. The proliferation of legal texts devoted to it, both nationally and internationally, demonstrates that the subject has reached maturity. However, given the scale of global warming and the collapse of biodiversity, is this field of law up to the challenges of this century?** ## Corps du texte Environmental law under pressure -------------------------------- In practice, environmental laws conflict with legitimate political, economic and social interests. This explains why, from the outset, they have been tempered by the requirement to meet certain thresholds of risk or damage (‘real’, ‘serious’, ‘significant’, ‘irreversible’, etc.) . Today, in the wake of the United States' double withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, under the guise of seeking simplification, a worrying phenomenon is gaining momentum. It aims to sideline environmental law by unfairly pitting the end of the world against the end of the month. These attacks are taking place in an unprecedented context. In the words of the International Court of Justice in its historic advisory opinion of 23 July 2025 on state climate responsibility, climate change and the collapse of biodiversity represent an ‘urgent and existential threat’. Given the circumstances, there is a stark paradox between, on the one hand, a maximum level of risk that threatens the future of humanity and, on the other, a minimal response that falls far short of the challenges. This discrepancy is even more striking in light of how humanity responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–2021, taking extraordinary measures, in the literal sense of the word, that were rapid, ambitious and courageous, despite differences and resistance. Of course, the stakes were high during the pandemic because lives had to be protected. But with the ecological and climate crisis, the stakes are existential because it is a matter of protecting life itself. Empirical, technical, contradictory, and rarely binding: environmental law does not have the wherewithal to protect life on Earth, which should be its goal. Its legitimacy is contested, and its effectiveness, nuanced. Nevertheless, the law remains a powerful tool for the preservation of humanity and life as a whole. It has proven its effectiveness in the past. For example, the 1987 Montreal Protocol to ban chlorofluorocarbons helped to ‘plug’ the hole in the ozone layer, and the 2015 Paris Agreement, despite falling short, slowed the average temperature rise from +4°C to +2.1°C. In the words of Laurent Fabius during his presidency of COP21, ‘every decimal point involves millions of lives’. As environmental law faces a crisis of legitimacy and effectiveness, we are witnessing the unloosing of what the legal scholar Mireille Delmas-Marty calls the imaginative forces of law, portending profound upheavals: climate trials, environmental rights, rights of nature, environmental commons, etc. Many continue to believe in the protective and transformative power of environmental law. Science, in particular: the 2024 report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) – the biodiversity counterpart of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – devoted to assessing the interdependencies between biodiversity, water, food and health, affirmed that one of the major levers for ensuring the sustainability of biodiversity and humanity is to ‘strengthen environmental laws and policies and their implementation, as well as the rule of law in general’. For environmental law to meet these challenges and rise to the issues at stake in protecting the future of humanity and the biosphere, two pathways are available. An interspecies, international, intergenerational law ----------------------------------------------------- The first pathway is a jurisprudence that is interspecies, international and intergenerational. Because the prosperity and posterity of humanity are dependent on the health of living organisms, environmental law must be strengthened through several approaches that combine species, space and time.  First, it must be interspecies. The existential crisis threatening humanity and living organisms is a crisis of the interdependent relationships that unite them in a shared destiny. The law has recognised these fundamental links since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, at the end of which States proclaimed ‘the integral and interdependent nature of the Earth, our home’. The United Nations General Assembly resolution of 28 July 2022 proclaimed the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, based on the following observation: ‘Environmental damage has adverse impacts on the effective enjoyment of all human rights.’ Here, traditional humanism expands and becomes what philosopher Baptiste Morizot calls relational humanism, designed to respond to the mutual vulnerabilities of all forms of life on Earth.  International environmental law must therefore be strengthened. A habitable Earth is a common good for all states and all peoples. In the face of shared fragilities, it is urgent to move beyond solitary sovereignty to achieve, in the words of Mireille Delmas-Marty, a solidarity-based sovereignty in favour of the prosperity and posterity of humanity. Environmental treaties exist – there are nearly 500 of them – but they are rarely binding. To remedy this, a movement underway in the legal world and beyond is seeking to increase the normative force of environmental law. Many states agreed to sign environmental treaties because they considered them non-binding. However, under pressure from facts, social expectations and the actions of judges, these texts are gradually becoming binding. Such is the case with the Paris Agreement, which judges at all levels – national, regional and international – have described as a binding text. Finally, environmental law must be intergenerational. As the German philosopher Günther Anders wrote, ‘since the effects of what we do persist, we have already reached that future today, which pragmatically means that it is already present’. In other words, we are the future generations. As an ethical principle, responsibility towards future generations in the environmental field is gradually becoming a binding legal principle. An international meeting held on 7 February 2024 at the French Constitutional Council, which brought together more than a hundred judges from around the world, confirmed this shift: consideration of future generations in treaties, constitutions, laws and by judges is gaining momentum and accelerating. In a major opinion made public on 3 July 2025, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights stated that, ‘The development of the normative tools necessary to make the survival of present and future generations on a habitable planet feasible constitutes a universal value that is the subject of growing concern, deliberation and action on the part of the international community." Responsibility for the future is indeed a challenge for the present. > **The Inter-American Court of Human Rights**, together with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, forms one of the two pillars of the Inter-American human rights protection system of the Organization of American States (OAS), in which 34 states from both the north and south of the continent participate. The United States, a member of OAS, has not recognised the jurisdiction of either the Court or the International Court of Justice. Knowledge, will and power ------------------------- To overcome the current fragility of environmental law and make it more robust, concrete actions must be taken in the three domains of ‘knowledge, will and power’. These can offer a second pathway.  Encouraging knowledge is essential to the success of an alliance seeking to preserve the planet’s habitability. Scientific knowledge must resist the attacks to which it is subjected and lawyers must continue to rely on it. In 2015, the facts reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change contributed to the success of the Paris Agreement. In 2022, it was the IPBES data that led to the adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. This fruitful dialogue between science and law must be deepened, in accordance with the principles of transparency and independence. It can take various forms, some of which are already in place: cross-training, multidisciplinary research, specialised courts, data collection, including using the most advanced techniques (satellite constellations, open source). Anthropological knowledge – local social and economic cultures, indigenous knowledge – also contributes to awareness of the interdependencies between human and environmental issues and must be integrated, as is already the case in the form of advisory or monitoring committees composed of local representatives who are familiar with the ecosystems to be protected.  Listening to people's wishes is also a way of strengthening environmental law. Conventions, petitions, citizen initiatives, climate and environmental lawsuits: civil society actors – NGOs, trade unions, businesses, citizens – guided by science and their own experience, are increasingly using the law to drive compliance with and co-construction of environmental rules. The challenge of strengthening environmental law also encourages those in power (states, subnational entities, transnational companies, etc.) to commit to a truly habitable planet. Ambitious climate and environmental responsibility rules, which aim to hold everyone accountable for their share of responsibility, are gaining momentum and becoming more specific. On 23 July 2025, in its unanimous opinion, the International Court of Justice ruled that all states, including those that are not parties to specific international conventions, had an obligation to prevent significant damage to the climate system, and that failure to do so could give rise to ‘\[the granting of\] full reparation to the injured States, in the form of restitution, compensation and satisfaction’. At the national level, since the Urgenda affair in 2015, many court decisions around the world have recognised the responsibility of states in the field of climate change. In 2023, the Brussels Court of Appeal recognised the responsibility of two Belgian regions for climate failure. In 2024, the Court of Appeal in The Hague upheld the principle of corporate responsibility in the fight against climate change, while leaving companies free to determine the terms and conditions in accordance with the objectives set by international law. > **The Urgenda decision**, issued in 2015 by the Dutch courts, is a historic decision because, for the first time, legal action brought by an environmental protection association and a thousand citizens resulted in a state being ordered to more ambitiously reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Although it does not solve everything, environmental law is a fundamental guide that shows the course to follow to reach a future where the health of the biosphere and posterity of humanity will coexist in a fair and sustainable manner. This course allows us to maintain the hope of remaining human. **References:** * Baard, P. 2024. ‘Rights of Nature through a Legal Expressivist Lens. Legal Recognition of Non-anthropocentric Values’, Springer Nature Link, 23 December 2024, * Delmas-Marty, M. 2019. _Sortir du pot au noir. L’humanisme juridique comme boussole_, Paris: Buchet Chastel, * Djemni-Wagner, S. 2023. ‘Droit(s) des générations futures’, Institut des études et de la recherche sur le droit et la justice (IERDJ), * Morizot, B. and Neyret, L. 2025. ‘Le principe habitabilité’ in Climate Change. The Critical Decade, _Revue européenne du droit_, 6. **_This article was originally published in Conférence issue No. 4, titled "Facing the Environmental Challenge", a publication that sheds light on major contemporary issues and informs public and private decision makers._** ### Thématique `#Environnement` **Langue :** `#Anglais` --- ### Navigation pour IA - [Index de tous les contenus](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/llms.txt) - [Plan du site (Sitemap)](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/sitemap.xml) - [Retour à l'accueil](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/)