National Climate Change Acts

This groundbreaking book collects contributions from many of the world's leading climate and energy law scholars and provides the first major study of national Climate Change Acts. This cutting-edge type of legislation originated with the first Climate Change Act framework which was passed in the United Kingdom in 2008, and is intended to enable the law to grapple effectively with one of the great problems of our times, anthropogenic climate change.

Since 2008, national framework climate legislation has been slowly but steadily emerging in countries across the world. This trailblazing collection employs a comparative analytical legal methodology and offers the first comprehensive study of this new, innovative form of legislative regime.

In addition to containing broad internationalist chapters, deep-dive national case study chapters are included that focus on individual countries and provide analytical depth. A final chapter draws together the threads of the book's foregoing contributions to deduce generalisable conceptual insights based on current knowledge and experience. Uniquely, the book provides a conceptual model for Climate Change Acts that can usefully inform the development of national framework climate legislation in all countries.

Leonie Reins is Professor of Public Law and Sustainability at the Erasmus Law School, Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Prior to that she was an Assistant Professor at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society ('TILT') at Tilburg University. Leonie obtained her PhD from KU Leuven, Belgium, where she also worked as a Post-Doc. The monograph based on her dissertation is entitled Regulating Shale Gas – The Challenge of Coherent Environmental and Energy Regulation (2017). Leonie obtained private sector experience whilst working for a Brussels-based environmental law consultancy, providing legal and policy services for public-sector clients such as the European Commission and the European Parliament.

Leonie's research focuses on the intersections of energy and environmental law. She is particularly interested in the regulation of new technologies that are capable of mitigating, or providing means of adaptation to, global problems such as climate change and the associated risks and uncertainty that manifest themselves at the local level. Leonie regularly speaks at international conferences and her works have been published in journals such as Energy Research & Social Science, Environmental Liability and Oil, Gas, Energy Law Intelligence (OGEL).