Implementing Environmental Constitutionalism: Current Global Challenges

Constitutions can play a central role in responding to environmental challenges, such as pollution, biodiversity loss, lack of drinking water, and climate change. The vast majority of people on earth live under constitutional systems that protect the environment or recognize environmental rights. Such environmental constitutionalism, however, falls short without effective implementation by policymakers, advocates and jurists. Implementing Environmental Constitutionalism: Current Global Challenges explains and explores this 'implementation gap'. This collection is both broad and deep. While some of the essays analyze crosscutting themes, such as climate change and the need for rule of law that affect the implementation of environmental constitutionalism throughout the world, others delve deeply into geographically contextual experiences for lessons about how constitutional environmental law might be more effectively implemented. This volume informs global conversations about whether and how environmental constitutionalism can be made more effective to protect the natural environment.

Erin Daly is Professor of Law at Delaware Law School. She serves as the Director of the Global Network for Human Rights and the Environment, as the US National Correspondent for the Centre international de droit comparé de l'environnement (CIDCE), and as the Vice President for Institutional Development at the UNIFA in Haiti. She is the author of Dignity Rights: Courts, Constitutions, and the Worth of the Human Person (2013), and along with James R. May is the co-founder of the Dignity Rights Project and co-author or co-editor of Judicial Handbook on Environmental Constitutionalism (2017), New Frontiers in Global Environmental Constitutionalism (2017), Global Environmental Constitutionalism (Cambridge, 2015), and Environmental Constitutionalism (2014).

James R. May is Distinguished Professor of Law at Delaware Law School, and former Chief Sustainability Officer at Widener University, Pennsylvania. May is the editor of Principles of Constitutional Environmental Law (2013), and co-editor of Shale Gas and the Future of Energy (2016) and Standards of Environmental Constitutionalism (Cambridge, forthcoming) and along with Erin Daly is co-author or editor of various works on environmental constitutionalism, co-director of the Dignity Rights Project, and co-director of the Environmental Rights Institute at Delaware Law School.