Focus on legal boundaries

Environmental laws are binding and enforceable tools that constrain human impacts on the environment, but how effective are they at keeping humanity away from critical planetary boundaries when faced with political pressure? In a paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, we describe a taxonomy of tactics that are routinely used to make biodiversity laws less effective.

We identify five broad categories of tactics used to weaken nature protection laws: i) changing the targets of protection, ii) changing the mechanisms of protection, iii) changing the importance of biodiversity relative to other considerations, iv) limiting access to justice and v) weakening the rule of law.

These tactics can occur through various public policy processes, for example legislative or executive acts, constitutional amendments or international agreements. Additionally, laws that remain constant on paper can nevertheless be changed in practice through evolving jurisprudence, administrative discretion or political interference. Finally, governments may simply disregard their legal obligations, without even changing the laws.

Read more in Chapron et al. (2017). Bolster legal boundaries to stay within planetary boundaries. Nature Ecology and Evolution 1(3): 0086.

Figure: Feedbacks between human activities (red area) and legal boundaries (yellow bands) relative to planetary boundaries (Earth). Legal boundaries may be effective when constraining growing human activities and preventing transgression of planetary boundaries. Increasingly porous boundaries, on the contrary, will let human activities grow and eventually transgress planetary boundaries. Misplaced boundaries are farther away than planetary boundaries and ineffective in preventing their transgression, and may be constantly pushed further by colliding human activities.