This article examines the effectiveness, legitimacy, and fairness of heritage conservation outcomes under the 1972 World Heritage Convention (1972 WHC), with a focus on recognising and respecting the rights of Indigenous Peoples in heritage nomination, protection, and management. Examining conflicts surrounding World Heritage sites in Kenya and Sweden, this article argues that recognition of biocultural heritage and biocultural rights can promote environmental justice and help meet global environmental challenges. To promote the conservation of both built and natural landscapes, the article recommends expanding protection for the relationship between humans and their environment. Recognising biocultural heritage under UNESCO conventions could promote Indigenous sovereignty, protect cultural and natural heritage, and contribute to global efforts to address climate change. The article calls for further research mapping biocultural heritage in natural and mixed heritage sites and advocates for fuller engagement with Indigenous Peoples to increase the ability of the 1972 WHC to promote sustainability as it enters its second half-century.

Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity are finalizing a new Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) to more effectively guide efforts by the world’s nations to address global loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Each party is required to mainstream the new framework and its component targets into national conservation strategies. To date, such strategies have been criticized as largely aspirational and lacking clear linkages to national policy mechanisms, which has contributed to the world’s general failure to meet the Convention’s previous targets. We use the United States and European Union as examples to compare and contrast opportunities and barriers for mainstreaming the GBF more effectively into policy. The European Union and United States have unique relationships to the Convention, the former being the only supranational party and the latter, having signed but never ratified the treaty, adopting Convention targets on an ad hoc basis. The contrasting conservation policy frameworks of these two polities illustrate several conceptual issues central to biodiversity conservation and demonstrate how insights from the GBF can strengthen biodiversity policy even in atypical contexts. We focus on three characteristics of the GBF which are essential if policy is to effectively motivate and guide efforts to halt and reverse biodiversity loss: comprehensiveness, coherence, and ambition. Statutes in both the United States and European Union provide a strong foundation for mainstreaming the GBF’s comprehensiveness, coherence, and ambition, but policy development and implementation falls short. We identify six common themes among the reforms needed to successfully achieve targets for reversing biodiversity loss: broadening conservation focus to all levels of biodiversity, better coordinating conservation strategies that protect sites and landscapes with those focused on biodiversity elements (e.g., species), coordinating biodiversity conservation with efforts to safeguard ecosystem services including ecosystem-based climate mitigation and adaptation, more coherent scaling of targets from global to local extents, adoption of a more ambitious vision for recovery of biodiversity, and development of effective tracking and accountability mechanisms.

The growing complexity and global nature of wildlife poaching threaten the survival of many species worldwide and are outpacing conservation efforts. Here, we reviewed proximal and distal factors, both social and ecological, driving illegal killing or poaching of large carnivores at sites where it can potentially occur. Through this review, we developed a conceptual social–ecological system framework that ties together many of the factors influencing large carnivore poaching. Unlike most conservation action models, an important attribute of our framework is the integration of multiple factors related to both human motivations and animal vulnerability into feedbacks. We apply our framework to two case studies, tigers in Laos and wolverines in northern Sweden, to demonstrate its utility in disentangling some of the complex features of carnivore poaching that may have hindered effective responses to the current poaching crisis. Our framework offers a common platform to help guide future research on wildlife poaching feedbacks, which has hitherto been lacking, in order to effectively inform policy making and enforcement.

Laws aimed at preventing harm to the environment appear to be insufficient to halt or reverse environmental decline. In a Perspective, the authors highlight recent efforts to address this issue by recognizing intrinsic rights of nature. Going beyond the rights for individuals that animal rights advocates call for, the rights of nature proponents focus on natural communities, ecosystems and other natural entities. Several jurisdictions around the world have recognized rights of nature in specific circumstances, providing a potential means to protect natural entities even when their needs conflict with those of humans. Successful expansion and implementation of this concept will, however, depend on legal systems' ability to integrate ecological knowledge, as well as how much weight is given to rights of nature when they are in conflict with those of humans or corporations.

The mounting threats posed to the global environment by harmful human activities cannot be averted without effective legislation controlling those activities. However, the environmental laws designed for this purpose are themselves under global attack. Because it is binding and enforceable, legislation is a unique and essential instrument in the overall effort to keep humanity’s impacts on the planet from transgressing critical thresholds. For instance, biodiversity laws do so by designating and protecting natural areas and controlling the exploitation of wildlife populations. Yet, due to short-term economic and other interests, such laws face constant pressures aimed at weakening their regulating impact on human activities. 

This new study reveals and illustrates the staggering number and diversity of tactics used to weaken biodiversity legislation across the globe. This ‘taxonomy of tactics’ encompasses dozens of categories, ranging from the creative re-definition of terms to the ‘fast-tracking’ of environmentally harmful projects, and from limiting concerned citizens’ access to court, to the silent or even express refusal of appointed authorities to enforce biodiversity laws.

Whereas the predicament of the planet’s wild fauna and flora would have been even worse without the legal protection they have received so far, the onslaught against biodiversity laws has prevented these from fully performing their assigned function. The global acceleration of wildlife population declines bears witness to this. To stem the tide, strategic approaches are needed to anticipate and counter attacks on biodiversity legislation; to make the most of existing laws, including in court if need be; and to develop new or improved laws where necessary.

Controversy continues over the return of the wolf to the Swedish landscape. Decisions to allow the licensed hunting of Sweden’s fragile wolf population in violation of the EU’s Habitats Directive have repeatedly been quashed by the Swedish administrative courts. In response, the law was changed: it is no longer possible to appeal those decisions to the courts. This article examines the decision to make impossible the judicial review of Sweden’s implementation of EU species protection law in light of the Aarhus Convention and in light of the EU law principles of useful effect and effective judicial protection. We conclude that while the access to justice requirements of the Aarhus Convention are likely fulfilled, the fact that Sweden’s hunting decisions pursuant to the Habitats Directive are no longer reviewable by a court contravenes EU law.

This chapter is a scholarly play in four acts. It is inspired by a series of discussions between three legal researchers (Van Dijk, Epstein and De Vries) and a cultural theorist (Goriunova), about proposals to grant legal personhood to two types of non-human entities: nature and artificial intelligence. We queried whether doing so would help meet challenges such as environmental catastrophes and co-existence with opaque and unpredictable AI systems. In Act I (Divergences) Law and Critical Theory present their respective positions, but fail to gain any understanding of each other. Law defends a neutral legal pragmatism, while critical theory debunks all claims to neutrality. Act II and Act III present two fictional narratives: one plays out in a courtroom where a man is suspected of the murder of a river (Act II) and the other features an AI-system addressing the European Parliament (Act III). By discussing these counterfactual narratives in Act IV (Convergences), Law and Critical Theory are, at least partially, able to see how there could be cross-fertilization between their respective positions: one has to take into consideration how legal personhood operates both inside the court room as well as how it impacts the world outside; and one can travel towards an “enlarged pragmatism” that focuses on the possibilities of masks, fiction and play in expressing different voices, perspectives and ontologies.

The Aarhus Convention requires that its parties make available to the public procedures that “provide adequate and effective remedies, including injunctive relief as appropriate, and [are] fair, equitable, timely and not prohibitively expensive.” In order to meet this requirement, it is imperative that procedures provide a means to actually prevent environmental harm. Unfortunately, there are numerous examples of court decisions that are victories for environmental protection on paper but defeats in practice because of an inability to stop the damaging activity while the case was being considered. Once environmental damage occurs, it is often irreversible.

This study summarizes remedies in environmental matters in thirty parties to the Aarhus Convention, as of 2011. It briefly outlines the administrative and judicial procedures in each country and describes the available procedural remedies. It then offers conclusions and raises issues for further inquiry. This study does not include the EECCA countries, which are being separately studied by others, or many of the Balkan countries, about which little secondary material was available.

This study was commissioned by and presented to the Aarhus Convention Task Force on Access to Justice.

This article compares the use of litigation to enforce species protection law in the European Union (EU) with that of the United States (US). Recent legal disputes over wolf hunting on both continents offer useful case studies. Focusing on three aspects of litigation – namely, (i) against whom claims are brought, (ii) who can bring claims, and (iii) the types of claim that can be brought – the analysis contrasts US-style adversarial legalism with its European counterpart, or ‘Eurolegalism’, and assesses what each approach is able to deliver in terms of the legal protection of wolves. It is argued that Eurolegalism helps to explain the development of species protection law in the EU and its similarities to and differences from the American experience.

This report represents a step towards meeting the goal of the Aarhus Convention Access to Justice Task Force to develop a set of good practices and analyses on three priority issues:

· The loser pays principle

Article 9(4) of the Aarhus Convention requires that procedures for obtaining access to justice must not be prohibitively expensive. In some legal systems, the loser of an administrative or judicial action must pay all, or a portion of, the winner's litigation costs. These costs may include court fees, attorney fees, witness fees, and various other types of expenses. The loser pays principle may lead to an inability to control or even predict exposure to risk, and thus unreasonably deter public interest environmental litigation. Good practices in this category are those that help potential public interest claimants manage their risk and prevent environmental legal procedures from becoming prohibitively expensive.

· Legal aid and other methods of funding for public interest lawyers and NGOs

One way in which many countries address the requirement that procedures not be prohibitively expensive is to provide legal aid, or some other method of funding. Good practices in this category are those that enable meritorious environmental disputes to proceed when potential claimants lack the funds to pursue claims on their own.

· Criteria for injunctions

Article 9(4) of the Aarhus Convention requires that access to justice procedures provide adequate and effective remedies, including injunctive relief. To be effective, procedures must provide a means for actually stopping an environmentally harmful activity or illegal administrative decision. Without the ability to obtain injunctive relief, serious and irreversible damage may occur before the legal dispute is decided. Good practices in this category are those that facilitate injunctive relief leading to an effective level of environmental protection.

This report was commissioned for the 4th Aarhus Convention Meeting of the Parties 

A rich diversity of plant and animal life is one of the sixteen environmental goals Swedish environmental law and policy aims to achieve. The EU also seeks to protect biodiversity through its Biodiversity Strategy. To these shared ends, certain plant and animal species are protected by the Swedish Environmental Code and its pursuant Species Protection Regulation, as well as by EU directives. Dispensation allowing exceptions to this protection may be made in accordance with general rules of consideration of the Environmental Code and the dispensation provisions of the Species Protection Regulation, which in part implement the EU biodiversity directives. However, this article shows that a majority of the administrative decisions allowing dispensation to harm species that are strictly protected under both EU and Swedish law are made not under the protective legislation, but under other types of legislation such as the Hunting Act and Fishing Act, which do not have environmental protection as their primary goals. This article highlights the legal consequences of dispensation decisions that affect strictly protected species being made under these various laws.

One of the key issues in the current controversy over the hunting of wolves in Sweden is whether the wolf population has reached favourable conservation status (FCS). FCS is a legal concept, created and defined in law, but like many legal concepts within environmental law, can only be understood by reference to ecological concepts such as species viability. These ecological determinations in turn often require some sort of legal or policy judgment, such as how great an extinction risk is acceptable for a viable population. This article interrogates contested legal and ecological aspects of FCS and argues for how they might be applied to the Swedish wolf in potential litigation.

The Directive on the conservation of natural habitats and of wild fauna and flora (Habitats Directive) aims to protect biodiversity in the European Union. It does so within a complex ecology of legal regimes for environmental protection at the international, EU, national, and regional levels. As the EU has continued to expand its competence, and the role of EU law for environmental protection continues to develop within the member states, it is important to examine the effect that EU law is having on biodiversity horizontally between states for the protection of transboundary populations, and the effect it has vertically as it interacts with international and national law.

This collection is a licentiate thesis consisting of four articles addressing the challenge of protecting species populations across legal jurisdictions. Its central aim is to examine how interactions and shifting centers of authority between different legal species protection regimes impact species protection. These legal systems may be contiguous, such as in the case of neighboring countries, or overlapping, such as in the case of EU and national law. Four sub-questions develop the analysis, each the central investigation of an article. The first article asks how EU law, and international law, affects the protection of transboundary populations of protected species in Sweden, Finland, and Norway. The second narrows in on a single concrete example in a member state, analyzing how EU law has affected the evolution of species protection in Sweden. The third lifts the analysis out of the Nordic context to examine more closely how the cooperation and tension between international and EU species protection law help or hinder the policy objectives of both. The fourth widens the scope further still, using a comparison with species protection in the United States to query how the division of responsibility for species protection between the federal or union level and the state or member state level affects protection.

Human laws manage the natural world, as best they can. But the resultant tangle of overlapping jurisdictions of laws and rules and management strategies becomes its own ecology to be explored, mapped and ordered. The title, “Governing Ecologies”, refers to this investigation of the governing of ecology and the ecology of governing.

Wolves are protected by law in both the United States (US) and European Union (EU). These laws restrict the harming or killing of individual members of protected species, but allow it in selective circumstances, such as when killing some individuals would benefit the species. In both unions, some states have argued that allowing the public hunting of wolves would in fact benefit the species by improving social tolerance for wolves, a claim that is currently the subject of controversy among scientists. In the absence of clear evidence that hunting is favourable for wolf populations, US courts have repeatedly struck down policies that allowed it. While hunting wolves to achieve their social acceptability is likely to also violate EU law, the EU court has not yet resolved the question and hunting for social acceptance continues in some Member States, such as Sweden and Finland. This article contrasts these legal responses to social ‘tolerance hunting’ and argues that the Habitats Directive should not be interpreted to allow tolerance hunting of strictly protected species. It then uses the contrasting legal situations to engage with the claim that the EU has become more ‘precautionary’ than the US on environmental matters.

The Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) largely sided with a small Finnish nature protection organization, Tapiola, in a recent judgment that interpreted limitations on the deliberate killing of wolves. Tapiola was able to utilize EU law to bring about both national compliance with EU species protection law and a legal decision that will impact the hunting of wolves and other protected species throughout the EU. Using the Finnish wolf controversy as a case study, this article illustrates how law may be used as a tool for environmental protection in the EU, and the interdependence of environmental NGOs and EU institutions in doing so. It also calls attention to the different roles for NGO stakeholders and different potential outcomes in infringement procedures and references for preliminary rulings.

The protection of biodiversity, like many other environmental goals, transcends political boundaries. This is particularly true regarding large carnivores, such as wolves, which typically require a relatively low population density and a range that often extends hundreds of kilometers across many legal borders. The two primary legal instruments promoting the protection of species in Europe, the Habitats Directive and Bern Convention, recognize that to be effective in preserving the long-term genetic diversity and thus survival of a population, conservation management must be coordinated throughout the population’s range. Despite the goal of international cooperation for species protection, conservation management rarely occurs at an international level. Using the Scandinavian and Karelian wolf populations as an example, this article comparatively analyzes the two conservation instruments and explores their effect on national law, thus illuminating how the legal situation for a species changes as it crosses political boundaries.

This dissertation examines how eco-knowledge intersects with the changes to EU legal cultures and practices known as eurolegalism. This conjunction has created a mechanism for the extension of EU law in the Member States even in the face of a weakened EU.

Through a portfolio of six articles, controversies over the protection of wolves in Sweden are used to illustrate and explicate the changing roles and responsibilities of various actors in protecting species, and the centralization of competence for environmental protection in Europe at the EU level. In doing so, some substantive requirements of the Habitats Directive are also analyzed. The first article maps the movement of competence to determine conservation policy towards the EU level and away from international and Member State actors. The second article examines what the EU requires of its Member States by analyzing the Habitats Directive’s key concept, favourable conservation status. It also makes normative arguments for how contested aspects of this concept should be interpreted to best achieve the Directive’s conservation goals. The third article deepens this analysis by applying these arguments to the Swedish wolf population. The fourth article is a case commentary illustrating the enforcement of the Habitats Directive through public interest litigation to stop the hunting of Swedish wolves. The fifth argues that the greater availability of public interest standing in the US than in the EU has led to the greater implementation of federal law. The sixth argues that greater availability of public interest litigation in Sweden than previously is also leading to the greater enforcement of “federal” EU law. Each of these articles demonstrates or explains factors that lead to the hollowing out of state power in favor of the EU and interest groups.

The Bern Convention of the Council of Europe and the European Union’s Habitats Directive are the primary legal instruments driving species protection in Europe. The Habitats Directive implements the Bern Convention in the EU. While the Habitats Directive has stronger enforcement mechanisms than the Bern Convention, it covers a smaller geographical region. Through cooperation, each has used the other’s strength to compensate for its weaknesses. This dynamic interplay between these two legal regimes has most often been beneficial to the pursuit of both instruments’ conservation goals, particularly with regards to enforcement, funding, and capacity building. As the EU has grown in size and competence, however, it now essentially has the ability to direct the application of the Bern Convention. This outsized influence presents challenges to the institutional synergy between the two instruments and the continued functioning of the Bern Convention as an independent legal regime with policy preferences separate from those of the EU.

In the European Union (EU), the Habitats Directive bans the killing of strictly protected animal species. The killing of individual animals may nevertheless be allowed when there is no satisfactory alternative and doing so would not be detrimental to the maintenance of species populations at favorable conservation status for one of five enumerated reasons. This exception has been used by national authorities to allow hunting, frequently triggering litigation. Here, we review several contested aspects of the provisions allowing exceptions from strict protection, particularly those in the controversial Article 16(1)(e), in order to clarify Member States' discretion in allowing hunting. Correctly interpreting these provisions is necessary to ensure species are protected at the level intended by the Habitats Directive, and that their conservation status is improved or maintained. Our review suggests that it would be very difficult for national authorities to allow the hunting of strictly protected species while complying with EU law.

This article argues that EU law can be interpreted to support the current existence of legal rights for animals and nature. While these rights have not been explicitly recognised in law, the prerequisites for doing so already exist in the EU legal order. The theoretical justifications for the protection of animals and nature differ, but the protection of both may benefit from a rights approach. Further, such a rights approach helps address jurisprudential questions pertaining to direct effect and the effectiveness of EU law, and related EU law concepts. In this article, we examine EU animal and nature protection laws to analyse where these laws can be interpreted to assign rights to non-human natural entities. We argue that the rights animals and nature already implicitly have in EU law should have consequences for how non-human protections should be implemented and enforced in the EU context.

Whether or under what circumstances the hunting of species listed as strictly protected in the Habitats Directive's Annex IV can be allowed has been the subject of extensive controversy and litigation in several Member States. Finland has asked the Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling on several questions, the answers to which will have wide-reaching consequences for how species are protected in the EU. This article addresses these questions, in particular the permissibility of the management hunting of strictly protected species, the permissibility of allowing hunting with the goal of preventing poaching, and at what scale the "favourable conservation status" of species populations should be considered. It argues that exploitive hunting of strictly protected species is not consistent with the purpose of the Habitats Directive, that hunting for the purpose of preventing poaching cannot be considered a conserva- tion measure under the Habitats Directive, and that species' conservation status should be considered unfavourable for the purposes of derogation if it is unfavourable at the local population level, the Member State level, or the EU level. It concludes by discussing the consequences of this analysis for hunting in the EU more broadly.

Actions potentially harmful to the environment that are otherwise illegal are sometimes permitted in cases of emergency. How to define an emergency can therefore be both controversial and highly consequential. In this article, we explore one such contemporary controversy: when the use of neonicotinoid pesticides, banned in the EU, can nevertheless be granted an emergency authorization. We analyse several questions, currently before the EU Court of Justice in the ongoing Pesticide Action Network Europe and Others case, that will determine the scope of an “emergency” in the context of derogating from the Pesticide Regulation, and that may impact how “emergencies” are defined in other legal contexts. We argue that the circumstances do not support a legal finding that emergency authorization is justified in this case, and that, in general, “emergencies” must be narrowly defined when justifying measures that involve risks to human health and the environment. 

The Stockholm Administrative Court recently ruled that Sweden’s wolf management policies are incompatible with the Habitats Directive. These policies are also the subject of an on-going infringement proceeding by the European Commission. The administrative court’s decision has been appealed. This case is significant for two reasons. First, it interprets controversial provisions of the Habitats Directive. But perhaps more importantly, it demonstrates the growing impact of EU law in a member state. This was the first major case in which the national courts were able to review a hunting decision pertaining to a species protected under EU law because standing to bring public interest lawsuits for the protection of species has been recognized only very recently. Under traditional Swedish procedural law, only the government can represent the public interest in administrative decision making and in court. Here, Swedish courts finally applied to hunting decisions the CJEU’s holding in Slovak Brown Bear, which says that national procedural law must be interpreted so as to allow environmental NGOs to challenge administrative decisions that might contravene EU environmental law. The court did not request a preliminary ruling despite that fact that controversial questions of EU law were implicated however. While the court applied EU law, it preferred to maintain control over its interpretation.

In this 2018 decision, the Colombian Supreme Court considered that deforestation in the Colombian Amazon contributed significantly to climate change and therefore violated the constitutional environmental rights of future generations, as embodied by the young people who brought the case. Further, it recognized the Colombian Amazon as a subject of rights, with the rights to protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration. In its decision, the Court ordered the state and other organizational defendants to take several innovative measures intended to stop deforestation. It ordered the Presidency of the Republic, the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, and other regional and municipal bodies to issue action plans to address deforestation and reduce the impact of climate change. It also ordered the Presidency of the Republic, the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development to formulate an "intergenerational pact for the life of the Colombian Amazon", together with the plaintiffs, impacted communities, scientists, and other interested persons including the general public, with a goal of reducing climate change, and reducing deforestation to zero. Importantly, this case made explicit the link between climate change, the rights of children, the rights of future generations, and the rights of nature.

We review the use of science by lawmakers and courts in implementing or rejecting legal rights for nature in Ecuador, India, the United States, and other jurisdictions where some type of rights of nature have been recognized in the legal system. We then use the "right to evolve" to exemplify how interdisciplinary work can (i) help courts effectively define what this right might entail; (ii) inform how might be applied in different circumstances; and (iii) provide a template for how scientists and legal scholars can generate the interdisciplinary scholarship necessary to understand and implement the growing body of rights-of-nature laws, and environmental law more generally. We conclude by pointing to what further research is needed to understand and effectively implement the growing body of rights-of-nature laws.

Rights of nature laws have been enacted in a growing number of countries, but the extent to which they are supported by public opinion has been unclear. We report the results of a survey in which over 11,000 participants across the EU were asked ‘Would you support or oppose policy that would give legal rights to forests or rivers – such as the right to exist free from destruction or pollution’. Most respondents said they would support such a policy: 62% would support, 28% were neutral or not sure, and 10% were opposed. We discuss some implications and limitations of the survey. The main implications are first, that majority support among respondents indicates that further rights of nature laws or policies could be enacted in the EU, and second, that a majority of respondents (68%) fell outside the most extreme categories (i.e., strongly support, strongly oppose) suggests there is also opportunity for advocates or opponents of rights of nature laws to shift public opinion. The main limitations are that the survey does not indicate what types of rights of nature laws respondents preferred, what types of trade-offs respondents would accept, that respondents may have limited knowledge or understanding of rights of nature, and that limited inferences can be drawn about whether public support for rights of nature will in fact lead to policy changes. More complex studies are needed to make more precise inferences.

This chapter discusses the requirements for the protection of species under Articles 12 to 16 and Annexes IV and V of the Habitats Directive, trends in the interpretation and enforcement of these requirements, and ongoing open questions. Amongst other things, the chapter discusses the Court of Justice of the EU’s (CJEU) leading decisions in Cases C-674/17 Tapiola (wolf hunting in Finland), C-441/17 Commission v Poland (Białowieża Forest), and Joined Cases C-473/19 and C-474/19 Skydda Skogen (strict protection of species in Sweden). The chapter concludes that, despite some political pressure, the trend seems to continue towards stricter interpretation and application of the Habitats Directive’s provisions on species protection by the CJEU and the European Commission.

A growing number of jurisdictions throughout the world have recognized some type of legal rights of nature. This jurisprudential trend has thus far made few inroads in Europe. However, its apparent absence is misleading. In this article we argue that, explicit or not, nature as protected by European Union (EU) law already has certain legal rights in the Hohfeldian sense because other entities have legal obligations towards it. Moreover, we argue that recent decisions of the Court of Justice of the EU can be interpreted to support our claim that nature, as protected by EU law, already enjoys some legal rights that cannot be trumped by mere utilitarian interests, and that these rights can in turn be recognized and applied by national courts. We further suggest that public interest litigation can contribute to developing rights for nature in Europe, even absent any explicit recognition of these rights in EU law or in national legislation.

Legislation for the preservation of biodiversity has been instrumental to the recovery of multiple species and habitats. The European Habitats Directive 92/92/EEC is one of the strongest legal tools in nature conservation. This Directive seeks to achieve its biodiversity goals by requiring EU Member States to take measures to reach or maintain Favourable Conservation Status (FCS) of natural habitats and species in Europe. FCS is a legal concept, but must be understood and applied by scientists, managers and policy makers, and therefore a proper interpretation of this concept is crucial for biodiversity conservation and wildlife management. However, its definition contains several aspects that can lead to misinterpretation, being the core of controversies in determining whether or not populations have reached FCS. In this review, we provide legal and ecological clarifications of the most contested aspects of FCS that have not yet been conclusively settled by analyzing and weighting a variety of sources.

This article examines three constitutional environmental provisions and how they have been applied by courts in Europe in three climate cases from Norway, Germany and France. In each of these cases, directive principles, that is, constitutionally entrenched state obligations to protect social values, generally by enacting legislation, played a key role in judicial decisions regarding climate change mitigation. We engage with Lael K. Weis’s analytical framework on directive principles to clarify the allocation of institutional responsibility for climate change mitigation as applied in these three cases, and argue that clarifying these roles alleviates some of the criticism regarding the democratic legitimacy of judicial decision making on climate change. Importantly, while courts do not directly enforce these types of constitutional directive principles, they must adjudicate them. When courts interpret constitutionally mandated legislation in light of directive principles, they develop new constitutional environmental norms. While most scholarly analysis of environmental constitutionalism has focused on environmental rights, our examination confirms Weis’s thesis that directive principles aimed at legislatures are also important forms of environmental constitutionalism, and deserving of further attention.

Many conservation professionals are familiar with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Ramsar Convention, and the World Heritage Convention. Regional instruments, such as those focusing on Africa, Antarctica, or Europe, are also conspicuous features of the conservation arena. Other international wildlife agreements focus on particular species, such as polar bears or albatrosses, or particular transboundary protected areas, such as the huge Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (see table 1). These agreements are collectively known as international wildlife law (Bowman et al. 2010). The binding agreements themselves are typically accompanied and informed by an evolving set of nonbinding instruments, such as Conference of the Parties (COP) decisions and action plans.

The European Commission has finally buried its controversial plan to revise the EU's biodiversity conservation legislation in order to make it more "business-friendly". Such a revision would have meant a fatal setback for European wildlife conservation. The 1979 Birds Directive and the 1992 Habitats Directive set out strict, enforceable obligations for EU member states to protect and restore vulnerable species and areas, and impose real limits on potentially harmful human activities. This legislation has the potential to actually do what it is supposed to do: protect vulnerable nature. Some governments and other stakeholders consider the Directives unduly restrictive, however, and in 2014 the new European Commission announced its wish to “modernize” the Directives as part of its broader deregulation agenda. The Directives have survived this most serious assault since their inception thanks to clear evidence of their effectiveness and an unprecedented public mobilisation campaign. The focus now shifts from revising the legislation to its effective application, including through litigation where necessary. Cooperation between lawyers and other conservation professionals will be crucial to achieve this.