Professor Eloise Scotford publishes paper on appraising national legal responses to climate change

UCL Faculty of Laws’ Professor of Environmental Law, Eloise Scotford, has published an article ‘Probing the hidden depths of climate law: Analysing national climate change legislation’.

Co-written with Stephen Minas, Assistant Professor at the School of Transnational Law at Peking University, the article examines challenges faced by national governments in evaluating how climate policy is supported by their legal and regulatory frameworks, and in introducing new legal measures to implement their Paris Agreement commitments, as set out by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC).

The paper proposes a three-part method for better understanding the fragmented legal and regulatory landscapes framing national responses to climate change. The method involves identifying explicit ('direct') climate laws and implicit ('indirect') climate laws, and investigating legal cultures that inform and express both types of climate-related law.

Professor Scotford presented some of the content from the paper at the 2018 Belgian Climate Governance Dialogue in Brussels last week.

The article is currently available to access freely on the Wiley Online Library, to coincide with the UNFCCC COP24 meeting on climate change, taking place in Katowice, Poland for two weeks from 2nd December.

Read the paper