Alleged victims have often played a central role in litigation aimed at prompting climate change mitigation. Courts have identified such victims in order to grant plaintiffs standing to sue, justify their invocation of individual rights and consider claims for compensation. This article observes, however, that no individual can really be, at least in a strict legal sense, a victim of a State or an entity’s failure to mitigate climate change. This is because, while climate wrongs certainly harm society, they do not harm specific individuals in a sufficiently direct and proximate way. This observation has major implications for climate litigation, but it is not a fatal flaw: the absence of victims does not necessarily preclude litigation as, for instance, standing can often be established on sounder legal grounds.

Decreasing CO2 emissions, a top priority of climate change mitigation, requires moving away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy. Research shows that women tend to exhibit more knowledge about climate change, environmental concerns, and pro-environmental behaviour than men. Theories linking descriptive and substantive representation suggest that women representatives better represent women citizens’ policy preferences. Therefore, do higher levels of women's parliamentary participation increase renewable energy consumption? A time-series cross-sectional analysis of 100 democracies from 1997 to 2017 provides evidence for such a relationship in both high- and middle-income democracies. Lagged modelling demonstrates that high-income states see more immediate effects while they take longer to materialize in middle-income states. These findings contribute to our growing understanding of women's role in policymaking outside of ‘women's issues’ and offer a means of advancing climate-friendly energy policy.

Individual-level solutions, such as lifestyle changes, are often regarded as cost-effective complements to systemic policies like government regulations in addressing climate change. However, some argue that exposure to these solutions may shift focus away from systemic interventions, potentially crowding-out support for large-scale policies. Across two experiments in Iran (N = 303) and Australia (N = 308 and 625), we tested whether exposure to different numbers of individual and systemic policies would affect individuals’ perception of systemic climate solutions. Results showed that, regardless of country or exposure type, whether through daily life or experimental manipulation, participants consistently supported systemic policies and changes, attributed greater responsibility to the government, perceived minimal conflict between systemic and individual approaches, rated systemic policies as more effective than individual ones, and viewed individual actions as only moderately substitutable for systemic solutions. These findings challenge the crowding-out hypothesis, suggesting that exposure to individual solutions does not diminish support for systemic policies or structural reforms.

Carbon credits have become increasingly important for supporting sustainable forest management and mitigating climate change. However, carbon projects can be challenging for local communities and smallholders to implement due to high expenses and complicated protocols. Forest projects often suffer from inefficiency, lack of transparency, and uneven benefit distribution. This study suggests a blockchain-based framework for aggregating forest carbon projects. This framework is the first in the forest sector to provide a reward mechanism for local communities or smallholders with a direct integration into an accredited registry protocol of Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification. The system combines digital identities, smart contracts, and automated incentives to improve transparency, responsibility, and trust among stakeholders. Two types of tokens are introduced: (i) Carbon Coin represents verified carbon credits within the system; and (ii) Forest Coin functions as a security token used to proportionally distribute project revenue among stakeholders. The revenue distribution was demonstrated in scenarios of afforestation, reforestation, and conservation. In addition, a web application was developed so that users can monitor project details. Unlike most blockchain carbon platforms that focus on investment and trading, this framework addresses upstream challenges, prioritising equitable benefit-sharing. The framework supports project aggregation and prioritises community ownership, advancing inclusive access to the carbon market. This study demonstrates how technological advantages can be transferred to community-driven ecological conservation.

This article analyzes the application of environmental impact assessment as a tool for climate change mitigation from a global comparative perspective. It firstly confirms that, despite persistent resistance in a few jurisdictions, climate effect assessment is now widely applied on a global scale. Yet the article also shows that this practice has faced recurrent practical and conceptual issues, in particular, concerning the determination of the significance of a project’s climate effect and the assessment of indirect effects. Lastly, this article assesses how states have addressed these issues and identifies good practices. In doing so, the article illustrates the potential of functionalist comparative analysis in advancing our understanding of climate law and suggesting policy-relevant conclusions.

Sustainable financial investments play a role in mitigating climate change. With this research, we explored how decision-makers use three investment strategies illustrating different primary motives: (1) money maximization (economic self-interest), (2) exclusion (not personally harming the environment), and (3) inclusion (helping the environment most efficiently). The relative use of these strategies was tested within a novel investment paradigm, aiming to artificially create a trade-off between financial payoffs (money maximization), environmental purity (exclusion), and environmental impact (inclusion). We recruited 1422 participants online and let them make ten consecutive investment choices, with incentivized outcomes, both monetary (i.e., potential bonus payment) and environmental (i.e., number of trees planted). We tested the change in investment choices using a between-subject design with four conditions, a control, and one default condition for each investment strategy. The three strategies were chosen about equally often in the control condition, but we find that this investment pattern could be altered by a default intervention. Preliminary evidence suggests that participants primarily using the exclusion and inclusion strategies differ in their moral reasoning. Utilitarianism better predicted the inclusion strategy, whereas high self-importance of moral identity better predicted the exclusion strategy.

The negotiation of the free trade agreement (FTA) between Australia and the United Kingdom promised to integrate trade and climate policies. As a leader of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) conference in Glasgow, the UK seemed well-placed to exert pressure on Australia, a country that was yet to embrace a target of net zero emissions by 2050. This article asks whether the FTA achieves this aim. It explains the link between trade liberalisation and climate change, referring to the scale and composition of economic activity and drawing upon examples from energy, agriculture, building and transportation sectors, as well as strategic factors. It provides an original analytical framework to assess the FTA's contributions to climate change goals, pointing to: (1) provisions to strengthen climate commitments, including net zero targets; (2) provisions to facilitate trade and investment in climate-related areas; and (3) provisions relating to enforcement and cooperation. It compares selected initiatives of other FTAs, including the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the European Union–Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), the UK–New Zealand FTA and the Singapore–Australia Green Economy Agreement. It reviews the FTA's negotiating process and its aftermath, including complaints about public participation. The article's conclusion that the FTA makes minimal contribution to climate change mitigation has implications for the broader quest for mutually supportive trade and climate policies, and, now that a net zero target has been legislated by the newly elected Australian Parliament, for the FTA's future implementation.

Courts and scholars have interpreted open-ended legal norms as imposing due diligence obligations on States and other entities to mitigate climate change. These obligations can be applied in two alternative ways: through holistic decisions, where courts determine the level of mitigation action required of defendants; or through atomistic decisions, where courts identify some of the measures that the defendant must take. This article shows that, whilst most holistic cases fail on jurisdictional grounds, atomistic cases frequently succeed. Overall, it is argued that atomistic litigation strategies provide more realistic and effective ways for plaintiffs to prompt enhanced mitigation action.

Climate change mitigation calls for the limitation and reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across all sectors. However, limiting GHG emissions from aviation has proven to be problematic for technical reasons (e.g., lack of low-carbon alternatives) as well as legal reasons (e.g., international aviation does not readily fall within any one state's jurisdiction). Relevant initiatives have followed two streams. At the international level, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has adopted technical standards and, more recently, a market-based mechanism to limit emissions from international civil aviation. In parallel, states have adopted their own policies and measures to regulate emissions from both domestic and international aviation, ranging from tax and technical standards to traffic management and infrastructural development. While much of the literature on climate change mitigation in the aviation sector has focused on international efforts, this article reveals the importance of understanding the tensions and complementarities of the two streams.

The Supreme Court of the Netherlands construed the state’s positive human rights obligations as requiring a 25 per cent reduction of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 compared with 1990 levels. This article explores how judges can decide the level of state effort required to mitigate climate change. To date, judges have predominantly approached this issue by seeking to identify an elusive benchmark, either by deduction from global objectives or induction from state conduct. This article shows that the judicial assessment of a state’s requisite efforts inevitably relies on equity infra legem. Acknowledging this, judges could learn from the international courts’ experience with establishing clarity in the midst of vague legal rules.