Guide on Ambient Air Quality Legislation - Air Pollution Series.

Embedding ambient air quality standards (AAQS) in legislation is an important foundation for effective national air quality governance. Legislation can establish institutional responsibility for air quality standards, set mechanisms for accountability, public participation and enforcement, and institutionalize processes for setting and updating robust air quality standards as knowledge and technologies develop. UNEP’s 2021 Regulating Air Quality: The First Global Assessment of Air Pollution Legislation found that, while most countries in the world do embed AAQS in legislation, there was no common legal framework for AAQS globally. UNEP has developed this Guide on Ambient Air Quality Legislation to assist national lawmakers and policymakers to develop or improve ambient air quality legislation. The aim of this Guide is to promote robust national systems of air quality governance that prioritize public health outcomes and respect that all humans share the same need to breathe air of adequate quality. The Guide emphasizes that air pollution is a collective problem arising from decisions and behaviours across a wide range of policy sectors. Thus, regulatory alignment across wide-ranging policy areas is critical to achieving AAQS in practice. This Guide addresses a lacuna that exists in air quality laws globally, providing a legal resource for developing robust national legislation that supports public access to scientifically evidenced levels of clean air

Harnessing science, policy, and law to deliver clean air

Despite increasing evidence and awareness, many countries continue to have weak air quality regimes. Trends in epidemiological and toxicological science point to health harms arising from air pollution at ever-lower concentrations, making the provision of clean air increasingly urgent yet ever more difficult to achieve. Compelling scientific evidence on causes, effects, and technical fixes is not sufficient to deliver global clean air ambitions; the law must play a central role in shaping actions. Yet despite an increase in the number of national laws and regulations that seek to address the problem, many countries still have weak air quality regimes. We identify six key future looking issues at the interface of science, the law, and policy, each of which shows why air quality governance is a complex, interdependent, and dynamic regulatory space, which needs interdisciplinary attention in diagnosing how air quality regimes might be improved

The role of environmental principles in the decisions of the European Union courts and New South Wales Land and Environment Court

The thesis is a comparative legal analysis of environmental principles in environmental law. Environmental principles are novel concepts in environmental law and they have a high profile in environmental law scholarship. This high profile is promoted by two factors – the high hopes that environmental law scholars have for environmental principles, and the increasing prevalence of environmental principles in legal systems, particularly in case law. This thesis analyses the latter, mapping doctrinal developments involving environmental principles in two jurisdictions and court systems – the courts of the European Union and the New South Wales Land and Environment Court.This doctrinal mapping has both narrow and broad aims. Narrowly, it identifies the legal roles in fact taken on by environmental principles within legal systems. Broadly, and building on this assessment, it responds to scholarly hopes that environmental principles (can) perform a range of significant roles in environmental law, including solving both environmental problems and legal problems in environmental law scholarship. These hopes are based on assumptions about environmental principles that have methodological weaknesses, including that environmental principles are universal and that they fit pre-existing models of ‘legal principles drawn from other areas of legal scholarship. The thesis exposes these methodological problems and concludes that environmental principles are not panaceas for pressing and perceived problems in environmental law. It does this by showing that the legal roles of environmental principles, which are significant in environmental law and its current evolution, can only be understood by closely analysing the legal cultures in which they feature. This is a conclusion for environmental law scholarship generally – while environmental issues and problems may be urgent and often global, legal analysis of the law that applies to those problems requires close engagement with legal systems and cultures, as they are and as they develop.</p