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The United Nations Decade of Ecosystem Restoration is an opportunity for States to advance the development of substantive and qualitative international law obligations for conducting restoration activities. This will help countries move beyond the more quantitative target‐driven approach that currently focuses international commitments on the percentage of degraded areas that have to be restored. In this paper, we argue for two pathways for States to accelerate and pursue international obligations to undertake ecological restoration. Firstly, we advocate for the development of a new international legal principle on ecological restoration, adding to existing international environmental law principles such as the prevention principle, and aiming at achieving the highest level of recovery possible. Secondly, we advocate to utilize available mechanisms through the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity and create a new protocol that will spell out a high ambition level for ecological restoration and a legal basis for adopting generally accepted rules and standards for restoration. The voluntary SER Principles and Standards can play an important role in the development of the legal principle on ecological restoration and standards of best practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Nations Decade of Ecosystem Restoration is an opportunity for States to advance the development of substantive and qualitative international law obligations for conducting restoration activities. This will help countries move beyond the more quantitative target‐driven approach that currently focuses international commitments on the percentage of degraded areas that have to be restored. In this paper, we argue for two pathways for States to accelerate and pursue international obligations to undertake ecological restoration. Firstly, we advocate for the development of a new international legal principle on ecological restoration, adding to existing international environmental law principles such as the prevention principle, and aiming at achieving the highest level of recovery possible. Secondly, we advocate to utilize available mechanisms through the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity and create a new protocol that will spell out a high ambition level for ecological restoration and a legal basis for adopting generally accepted rules and standards for restoration. The voluntary SER Principles and Standards can play an important role in the development of the legal principle on ecological restoration and standards of best practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Restoration by private actors on private lands is essential for achieving landscape-level restoration (‘eco-restoration’). This article identifies a typology of private actors presently involved in eco-restoration including philanthropists, indigenous people, non-governmental organisations, multi-stakeholder collaborations, and corporations and suggests motivations for these actors to engage in restoration activities. The article observes that an ‘inactive majority’ of private landowners is not involved in restoration efforts. Acknowledging that a lack of information may be contributing partially to the lack of landowner involvement, this article suggests another theory for non-involvement and apathy: the status quo bias. The paper concludes with a slate of policy suggestions for how the status quo bias might be addressed for private landowners who have the means to engage in restoration but do not currently do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the author's views about how to fulfill the human right to food and a healthy environment as of 2016, and it examines whether states should continue to pursue cheap outputs of food and status quo domestic food security strategies that could threaten long-term environmental security. The impact of industrial food production on environmental resources is assessed, along with global food laws, agroecology, and soil pollutants such as pesticides.

As one of the most disaster-prone nations, China is grappling with creating effective adaptation strategies. In an effort to pool risk, Chinese officials are introducing new climate change insurance products. This Article describes one pilot product introduced in the City of Shenzhen, a global megacity with a population of approximately fifteen million, and explores its strengths and weaknesses as a model for adaptation to climate change. This Article concludes with proposals for reducing risk within mega-cities and pooling risk among them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International Disaster Law (IDL) and International Environmental Law (IEL) have developed as two separate subsets of public international law. IDL has until recently focused largely on developing effective disaster relief laws, while IEL has focused on addressing long-term transboundaiy environmental crises. This Article argues that the connection between the two legal regimes has been undervalued. Using the ecological case study of excess nutrients (e.g., nitrogen and phosphorus), this Article posits that almost forty years of international legal efforts have failed to reverse the current trend of increasing coastal "dead zones " due to the existence of a form of "bystander effect" whereby nations wait for other nations to react first. To avoid this bystander effect, this Article suggests that the implementation of IEL obligations would benefit from taking an IDL approach by reframing land-based pollution as a disaster risk reduction priority and by applying disaster risk reduction approaches to the problem. While there will continue to be great demand for disaster relief activities, investing in legal approaches that reduce community vulnerability to longterm ecological hazards may avoidfuture ecological disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the global decline in commercial whaling, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) has been at the centre of a long-standing debate between pro-whaling industry States and whale preservation States that threatens the collapse of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW) as a treaty regime. This article describes the ongoing treaty regime disagreement that led to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Whaling in the Antarctic case and suggests that the ICJ’s decision highlights further weaknesses in the existing ICRW treaty regime. The fissures in the treaty regime have become even more apparent with the IWC Scientific Committee’s request for more data from the Japanese government on the Proposed Research Plan for New Scientific Whale Research Program in the Antarctic Ocean (NEWREP-A) and Japan’s diplomatic threat to unilaterally resume whaling. The article concludes with a suggestion that States amend Article VIII in order to strengthen the existing ICRW framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the focus of the emerging field of International Disaster Law is on state responsibility. Yet the source of some disasters is the failure of corporations to address known risks created by a company or located on company property. This Article queries whether there are obligations for corporations to act under international human rights law to prevent disasters where corporations have control over known hazards such as tailings dams or chemical dumps. This Article concludes that corporations have a legal duty to act in order to support and protect human rights whenever there is corporate knowledge, of hazards that may precipitate a disaster. Additionally, corporations are often well-placed to provide temporary emergency relief during disaster. This Article suggests there may be a legal duty for corporations to temporarily protect the fundamental human rights of communities during a disaster until government-organized relief is available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing accounting for the removal of nearly one out of every eight fish from the oceans, illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing is a problem of global proportion. A growing amount of illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing is the result of expansion into new "business ventures'' by transnational organized criminal groups that are easily facilitated within the margins of the law by unregulated access to flags of convenience, little regulation of transshipments, the existence of ports of convenience, and an active business in offshore shell companies and tax havens. This Article argues that part of the failure of states to respond to the growing illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing crisis is a lack of effective governance by both vertical and horizontal government networks. In contrast, transnational criminal networks have functional and flexible governance networks that permit them to respond nimbly to changes in government enforcement. To address global illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, horizontal government networks should focus on addressing large-scale illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing as a transnational crime problem and not as a fishery management challenge. Given the irreparable damage to both marine living resources and to fishery-related livelihood, illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing should be regarded as a transnational "serious crime. " Under the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, states should create sanctions that explicitly identify illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing by transnational syndicates as "serious crime" (requiring at least four years of imprisonment) and invest additional state funding in monitoring and enforcement of illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. This Article proposes a number of additional suggestions to strengthen the capacity of domestic government networks, including characterizing illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing as a "serious crime" in national fisheries codes, harmonizing criminal laws on illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing across jurisdictions, creating concurrent extraterritorial jurisdiction over large-scale illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing crimes, and authorizing states to acquire information about "beneficial owners " of illegal, unreported, and unregulated vessels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The caseWhaling in the Antarctic(Australia v. Japan)decided by the International Court of Justice is a landmark that introduces new parameters for measuring the “reasonableness” of scientific research by permit under the International Convention on Whaling. However, aspects of these parameters and how they may be applied in future cases remain uncertain. Because the Court's interpretation of the language “for purposes of scientific research” avoids defining scientific research, the Court's decision provides only a limited degree of clarification for States that intend to operate scientific whaling programs under Article VIII of the Convention. The Court's reasonableness test is unlikely to prevent scientific whaling. States who no longer support the dual object and purpose of the Whaling Convention may want to consider negotiating a new international instrument that would be more protective of whales and their habitat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea's March 2012 Judgment in theBay of Bengal Caseis a landmark decision in multiple ways. It represents the first maritime boundary to be delimitated by the Tribunal. It is the first adjudication of a maritime boundary in Asia, and it is also the first judicial delimitation of a maritime boundary for parts of the extended continental shelf located seaward of the 200-nautical-mile limit from baselines. While the Tribunal's ruling largely resolves the maritime dispute between Bangladesh and Myanmar, it also raises a number of questions and concerns that are highlighted in this article, including the Tribunal's approach to delimitation both within and beyond the 200-nautical-mile limit, the treatment of islands, the interplay between law of the sea institutions and the creation of a so-called grey area where continental shelf jurisdiction falls to one state and water column jurisdiction to the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade of globalization, States in the Middle East, East Asia, Europe, and North America have looked towards Africa and Southeast Asia for opportunities to lease for 30-50 years large tracts of arable land for production of commodity crops and biofuels in order to meet the needs of home markets. Facing their own governance challenges, States in Africa and Southeast Asia have leased land to private foreign investors without requiring any environmental review or mitigation of the proposed land leases. This paper argues that in food insecure states the recent flurry of land leasing activity to foreign agribusiness is likely to lead to unintended long term consequences for the ecology in land-leasing States by depleting the already fragile environment through monocropping, chemical pesticide and fertilizer applications, and large scale irrigation. This paper argues that international investment law may provide foreign investors with legal protection if land leasing States in the future decide to regulate the leases in a manner that discriminates against large agribusiness. The current proposals for self-regulatory voluntary codes of conduct do not provide sufficient oversight over the leasing process to protect the public's interest in a healthy and productive environment against foreign investors who have under the current lease structure no incentive to improve the land that they are leasing. The creation of an United Nations based ombudsman to provide legal and technical oversight and support for States making longterm leases has greater potential than a voluntary code for ensuring a balanced negotiation among the interests of host State governments for investment, investors for arable land, and the public for long-term sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study which argued the importance of implementing modified conservation easements in Papua New Guinea in order to protect the present levels of biodiversity. Background on biodiversity in the country and government efforts in protecting the environment; Discussion on land as more than a commodity; International environmental ideas.