This important book investigates the environmental legal frameworks, court structures and relevant jurisprudence of nineteen countries, representing legal systems and legal cultures from a diverse array of countries situated across the globe. In doing so, it distils comparative trends, new developments, and best practices in adjudication endeavours, highlighting the benefits and shortcomings of the judicial approach to environmental governance.

Major environmental issues currently confront Canadian society in its global context, including threats to natural resources, deteriorating water and air quality in certain communities, and policy challenges related to climate change. There is a variety of actual and potential roles for Canada's courts, which are powerful, independent and well-respected institutions. The courts have been called upon to make decision regarding prosecutorial authority, and the exercise of statutory authority related to the environment. As voluntary policy instruments gain traction, traditional environmental enforcement in the courts may decline; this threatens to restrict future development of private law principles in the environmental context. Factors that will continue to shape courts' enforcement of environmental requirements include increasing pressures for accountability and democratic legitimacy in the enforcement process, the shift to a service economy, globalization, and international developments in environmental law. Strong language in Canadian environmental statutes suggests that courts' implementation of environmental values will entail including sustainability as a fundamental principle.

Success in tackling environmental degradation relies on the full participation of everyone in society. The judiciary is a crucial partner in promoting environmental governance, upholding the rule of law and in ensuring a fair balance between environmental, social and developmental considerations through its judgements and declarations. This publication outlines the work done by UNEP in cooperation with several partners in developing and implementing a programme to engage the judiciaries of all countries in the pursuit of the rule of law in the area of environment and sustainable development.

This research utilizes legal court cases to describe scientific, legal, and political controversies inherent in the real-world implementation of environmental legislation during the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Most current scholarship focuses solely on the science, legal practices, or politics involved in the application of environmental statutes. This works utilizes environmental history and legal history methodologies to argue that environmental legal cases are not simply beacons of environmental successes or failures. They are windows into the scientific, legal, economic, and political contexts in which they occurred. The majority of environmental laws were created nearly a half-century ago during the golden era of the contemporary environmental movement and their application has been tested in a string of legal cases. The cases presented in this work are illustrative of the increased role of the judiciary in environmental topics and how legal courts have dealt with dilemmas of environmental policies. The Oregon District Court case Defenders of Wildlife; et al. v. Secretary of the United States Department of the Interior (2005) focused on the role of science, politics, and law in the management and conservation of the gray wolf under the Endangered Species Act. The US Supreme Court case Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife (1992) demonstrated the conservative natureof the Rehnquist Court (1986-2006) and its effect on legal standing in future environmental cases. The US Supreme Court case Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council (2008) highlighted the conflict between US national security and environmental protection invested in the protection of marine life from US Navy sonar. The primary inquiry is how the environmental legislation created during the latter twentieth century has and will survive the changes in science, politics, and law during the early twenty-first century.

A comprehensive examination of international environmental litigation which addresses the major environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.

Reflecting a global trend, scores of countries have affirmed that their citizens are entitled to healthy air, water, and land and that their constitution should guarantee certain environmental rights. This book examines the increasing recognition that the environment is a proper subject for protection in constitutional texts and for vindication by constitutional courts. This phenomenon, which the authors call environmental constitutionalism, represents the confluence of constitutional law, international law, human rights, and environmental law. National apex and constitutional courts are exhibiting a growing interest in environmental rights, and as courts become more aware of what their peers are doing, this momentum is likely to increase. This book explains why such provisions came into being, how they are expressed, and the extent to which they have been, and might be, enforced judicially. It is a singular resource for evaluating the content of and hope for constitutional environmental rights.

Judges play a critical role in the development, enforcement and compliance with environmental law. To showcase the role of the judiciary in upholding the rule of law, IUCN organized a "Judiciary Day" at its 2004 World Conservation Congress in Bangkok. This publication contains papers and speeches covering some of the cutting-edge themes that were discussed. It is hoped that these proceedings will enable a wide community of readers to better understand the crucial role of the judiciary in achieving the goals of sustainable development and nature conservation.