Environmental Assessment as a Tool for Climate Change Mitigation

Most governments have established procedures to appraise the environmental impacts of proposed activities. The focus of these environmental assessment procedures has long been on local environmental issues, such as air, water, and land pollution, which have a direct and concrete effect on communities. In recent years, however, these procedures have increasingly been used to consider how activities could result in the emission of greenhouse gases and exacerbate climate change.

Environmental Assessment as a Tool for Climate Change Mitigation builds on a broad survey of over one hundred national environmental assessment practices - legislation, guiding documents, cases, and administrative practice - to reflect on the main conceptual and practical issues facing climate assessment. By presenting and discussing jurisdictional developments and national debates in a global comparative perspective, this book aims to enrich our collective understanding of the modalities of and, ultimately, the mitigation opportunities arising from, the use of climate assessment in relation to proposed activities. The author concludes this timely and forward-looking volume by identifying good practices that lawmakers, regulators, national agencies, judges, and lawyers should consider when developing and applying the law on climate assessment.

Benoit Mayer, Professor of Climate Law, University of Reading

Benoit Mayer is Professor of Climate Law at the University of Reading, UK. His research focuses on climate law, including the climate-migration nexus, the international law obligations on climate change mitigation, and the real-world effects of climate litigation. He is the author of International Law Obligations on Climate Change Mitigation (Oxford University Press, 2022) and The International Law on Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2018). His research on the use of environmental assessment as a tool for climate change mitigation received the ICLQ Young Scholar Prize in 2019.