About the Book: Land use climate bubbles are popping up throughout the nation at an alarming rate, creating an economic crisis that will be more damaging than that of the housing bubble of 2008. The costs to ecosystems and low- and moderate-income households are equally severe. These bubbles, where land and building values are declining, provide extensive, objective evidence that climate change is real and must be dealt with on the ground. And it sidelines the ideological battles over the political response and instead requires us to focus on the practical question: what can we do to respond? Climate action seeks to avoid the harm we can't manage and to manage the harm we can't avoid. Local leaders understand the urgency of the crisis and are highly motivated to learn how to prevent and mitigate its consequences. This book describes how the local land use legal system can leverage state and local assistance to reduce per capita carbon emissions as an important and now recognized component of global efforts to manage climate change. The tools and techniques presented in the book are available to the nation's 40,000 local governments, if led by courageous leaders choosing to succeed in this epic battle. About the Author: John R. Nolon is Distinguished Professor of Law at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University where he teaches property, land use, dispute resolution, and sustainable development law courses and is Counsel to the Law School's Land Use Law Center which he founded in 1993. He served as Adjunct Professor of land use law and policy at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies from 2001-2016.

Taking a sweeping look at the current and proposed legal aspects of coping with climate change, this is a comprehensive resource of laws aimed at increasing resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change. Written by authorities from private practice, government, and academia, this compendium examines the legal aspects of coping with climate change, both in the United States and around the world. Topics include water, energy, building and infrastructure, public lands, coastal issues, species and ecosystem impacts, disaster preparedness, and critical international issues.

This comprehensive, current examination of U.S. law as it relates to global climate change begins with a summary of the factual and scientific background of climate change based on governmental statistics and other official sources. Subsequent chapters address the international and national frameworks of climate change law, including the Kyoto Protocol, state programs affected in the absence of a mandatory federal program, issues of disclosure and corporate governance, and the insurance industry. Also covered are the legal aspects of other efforts, including voluntary programs, emissions trading programs, and carbon sequestration.

Climate Change and the Law is the first scholarly effort to systematically address doctrinal issues related to climate law as an emergent legal discipline. It assembles some of the most recognized experts in the field to identify relevant trends and common themes from a variety of geographic and professional perspectives. In a remarkably short time span, climate change has become deeply embedded in important areas of the law. As a global challenge calling for collective action, climate change has elicited substantial rulemaking at the international plane, percolating through the broader legal system to the regional, national and local levels. More than other areas of law, the normative and practical framework dedicated to climate change has embraced new instruments and softened traditional boundaries between formal and informal, public and private, substantive and procedural; so ubiquitous is the reach of relevant rules nowadays that scholars routinely devote attention to the intersection of climate change and more established fields of legal study, such as international trade law. Climate Change and the Law explores the rich diversity of international, regional, national, sub-national and transnational legal responses to climate change. Is climate law emerging as a new legal discipline? If so, what shared objectives and concepts define it? How does climate law relate to other areas of law? Such questions lie at the heart of this new book, whose thirty chapters cover doctrinal questions as well as a range of thematic and regional case studies. As Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), states in her preface, these chapters collectively provide a “review of the emergence of a new discipline, its core principles and legal techniques, and its relationship and potential interaction with other disciplines.”

A perfect introduction to climate change law, this textbook offers students and scholars an overview of the international law governing this fundamental issue. It demonstrates how to interpret the language used in the applicable instruments and conventions, and sets climate change law in its broader international legal context.

Softbound - New, softbound print book.

This timely and incisive book combines an introduction to the core legal and policy issues presented by climate change with a deeper analysis of decisions that will define the path forward. Offering a guide to key terms, concepts, and legal principles in the field, this book will help readers develop a sophisticated perspective on issues central to climate change law and policy.