environmental law — Online Journal — Columbia Undergraduate Law Review

How International Children’s Rights Law Can Force Governments to Prioritize Tackling Climate Change

The United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) guarantees youth the human right to be protected from threats. According to the convention, which was ratified by 196 UN member nations, all children are entitled to the “inherent right to life” and education, with the goal of these rights being the “development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential.” Of all the threats children face, climate change is, without a doubt, proving itself to be the most formidable and existential. Today, the planet increasingly hurdles over temperature records, while extreme weather phenomena worsen in intensity and frequency each year. It has become increasingly evident that, due to climate change, children will lack an environment conducive to their development in the coming decades.

Milieudefensie et al v. Royal Dutch Shell: Budding Legal Corporate Accountability in the Climate Change Fight

In the past fifty years, torrents of environmental regulations have washed down upon corporate activity around the world, collecting into what many have termed an ‘environmental alphabet soup.’ Indeed, over 1,300 multilateral environmental agreements, 2,200 baseline environmental assessments, 250 other environmental agreements, and 90,000 individual country actions in accordance with these assessments currently exist. Yet, because international environmental standards lack systematic means of enforcing corporate adherence, corporate heads have the leeway to continue prioritizing profit over their environmental responsibilities, and, as a consequence, the world has seen a 75 percent increase in global greenhouse gas emissions between 1970 and 2004. To remedy this lack of oversight, the corporate accountability movement aims to build an environmental standard of care: a set of responsibilities each corporate entity has to prevent any anticipatable environmental damage.

A Win for Clean Water: County of Maui v. Hawaii Wildlife Fund

The 1972 Clean Water Act (CWA) is a landmark piece of legislation that protects American waters from pollutants and discharges. To regulate pollution discharges, the drafters of the CWA created a legal framework, the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES), that requires agencies to obtain an NPDES permit for pollution discharges that originate “from a point source” such as pipes or man-made ditches and enter certain bodies of water, i.e. navigable waters and surface water bodies termed “waters of the United States.” However, the definitions of “point source” and “waters of the United States” in the CWA have proven too vague and have thus been the source of much litigation.