Responsible Design of Drones and Drone Services:Legal Perspective Synthetic Report

The term “drone” is the common language of all types of aircraft without a pilot on board and their ancillary components, such as a control station, if applicable. In addition to the common term “drone”, other terms and acronyms, among others, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), Unmanned Aircraft (UA), Pilotless Aircraft and Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) are also widely used in publications. In the past 5 years, drones have demonstrated significant growth in civil market as not only a leisure product but also a tool which can provide professional services. Professional uses of drones include, among others, agricultural services, surveillance, search and rescue, monitoring and inspection, parcel delivery and picturing and filming. Compared to conducting those services above by manpower, drones provide services in higher efficiency and accuracy, decrease the cost of actions, and expand the accessibility. The deployment of drones has impacts on individuals, the society and the environment. The potential threat to aviation safety as well as the safety of persons and properties on the ground is a central issue. In addition, given that drones are very often equipped with cameras and sensors, the potential violation to personal privacy and data protection by drone users is the major barrier that hinders the public acceptance of drone applications

A framework for reviewing laws and policies for climate resilience – The case of the Vietnamese Mekong Delta

This article proposes a framework for reviewing to what extent laws and policies of a legal system support climate resilience. This article adopts the social-ecological system (SES) resilience theory and translates its core features into an operational framework which consists of four legal dimensions crucial for promoting climate resilience – adaptiveness of law, distributive justice, broad participation, and cross-scale interactions, and further identifies several indicators below each dimension. Then this article operationalizes the four legal dimensions via reviewing current Vietnamese climate adaptation laws and policies to assess to what extent they promote a climate-resilient Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD). While various barriers can be found in the current legal framework and policies which impede climate resilience, the latest National Climate Change Adaptation Plan demonstrates great improvement in facilitating climate resilience in a just, participatory and coordinated manner

Adaptive Governance of River Deltas Under Accelerating Environmental Change

Many deltas are increasingly threatened by environmental change, including climate change-induced sea-level rise, land subsidence and reduced sediment delivery. Dealing with these challenges is a pressing necessity because deltas are home to many people and are important centres for economic and agricultural development. Successfully adapting to climate change requires a social-ecological system (SES) perspective, emphasising that social and ecological components of deltas are intertwined. Various modes of governance have been suggested to deal with uncertainty associated with environmental change in SESs, such as adaptive governance. Adaptive governance underlines the need for governance systems to be flexible enough to adapt to variable degrees of uncertainty in SESs. In this paper, we analyse the Dutch Delta Programme (DDP) and the Mekong Delta Plan (MDP) to explore their strengths and limitations relating to nine principles for adaptive governance proposed by DeCaro and others. We evaluate the suitability of this framework for the Rhine and Mekong deltas and contribute to the current understanding of delta governance in light of climate change. Most of the principles outlined by DeCaro and others are present in the DDP and MDP. However, adaptive governance is context dependent. The Rhine and Mekong deltas display different obstacles to adaptive governance, some of which are not sufficiently emphasised in this academic adaptive governance framework. Instead of relying on one framework as a blueprint for adaptive governance, using principles from different frameworks depending on the case may be the best approach for addressing environmental challenges in deltas

Sustainable floods: Exploring stakeholder perceptions of sedimentation strategies for the sinking Mekong delta

The Mekong delta in Vietnam, home to over 17 million people, is rapidly losing elevation due to groundwater-extraction-induced subsidence, natural compaction and global sea-level rise. These combined processes result in salinity intrusion, erosion and land loss. The delta has been extensively poldered for agri- and aquaculture, largely cutting off the land from the dwindling supplies of fluvial sediment which would otherwise accumulate on the delta during seasonal floods and increase land elevation. Considering the current state of the Mekong delta and sediment delivery from upstream, the future sustainability of the delta cannot rely on natural delta-building processes and instead must be planned and managed to prevent major degradation of the system. Sedimentation strategies are methods of ensuring that the limited sediment available is retained to increase elevation where it is desirable for the population and sustainability of the delta. Considering the potential disruption to land uses and livelihoods caused by sedimentation strategies, it is vital to discuss the possibilities for sedimentation strategies with stakeholders to ensure that people, particularly vulnerable groups, are not disadvantaged, and ensure that delta management is sustainable from all perspectives. In this research we engage with stakeholders to start an explorative dialogue on the potential of sedimentation strategies in the Mekong delta considering physical, socio-institutional, governance and legal aspects. We resent an analysis of interviews and workshop discussions with farmers, officials, and regional experts in the provinces of Soc Trang (coastal, the most downstream part of the delta) and An Giang (inland, the most upstream part of the delta) to gain insights into local perspectives in different areas of the delta, with different physical environments, land use histories and constraints. Preliminary findings suggest that the perceived role of sediment varies across different stakeholders e.g. farmers focus more on the role of sediment for their agricultural activities while experts also express their concerns on the elevation of the delta. Interestingly, while sediment is perceived to be important in the upstream area, it is considered an inconvenience in the downstream part of the delta due to, among other factors, different types of livelihoods. It is therefore recommended that the sedimentation strategies need to be designed based on the typical livelihoods of locals and communication strategies need to be enhanced to raise the awareness of local actors on the role of sediment

International legal framework for geoengineering: Managing the risks of an emerging technology

The present book “International Legal Framework for Geoengineering – Managing the Risks of an Emerging Technology” is about international law and an emerging technology called geoengineering, which refers to the large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment for counteracting anthropogenic global warming and its effects. Geoengineering provides new possibilities for humans to deal with dangerous climate change and its effects, on the one hand, and creates new risks to the planet, on the other hand. Scientific uncertainties contained in such novel techniques and their impacts bring challenges to environmentalists, politicians as well as lawyers. In response to the challenges posed by geoengineering to international law, this book is aimed to identify and develop the rules and principles that control the risks arising from geoengineering activities to the environmental and human health without neglecting the contribution that geoengineering could make in preventing serious or irreversible climate change and its impacts. The author argues that, first, the employment of geoengineering should not cause significant environmental harm to the areas beyond the jurisdiction of the state of origin or the areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction (the global commons), and the risk of causing such harm should be minimized or controlled. Second, the potential of geoengineering in contributing to preventing dangerous climate change should not be downplayed. This book examines the rules and principles that apply to geoengineering techniques under contemporary international law and proposes an international legal framework for governing geoengineering in the future

Climate neutrality in the EU and China: An analysis of the stringency of targets and the adaptiveness of the relevant legal frameworks

The European Union (EU) and China have committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 and 2060, respectively. To explore the legal nature of these objectives and how the legal frameworks support their delivery, this article assesses the stringency of objectives and the adaptiveness of relevant legal frameworks. The former compares the objectives' bindingness, scope, prescriptiveness and precision of such obligations and compliance mechanisms. The latter compares the dynamism of mitigation policies and the legal institutions and processes that promote decarbonization. The article concludes that the climate neutrality objective is enshrined in the EU's climate law framework with a high degree of stringency overall. By contrast, China mainly incorporates the targets into administrative measures, the cadre responsibility and evaluation system, lacking formal rules and robust enforcement. By accelerating legal reform to integrate carbon neutrality into relevant regulatory instruments and addressing implementation problems, China explores its distinctive pathway to delivering on the objective

An experimental approach to regulating non-military unmanned aircraft systems

This article introduces three modes of regulatory experimentation – derogation, devolution and open-texture – for regulators to respond to the challenges brought by disruptive innovation such as non-military unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). This article argues that where there is an urgency of requiring a regulatory response to a new societal challenge, and there is serious empirical uncertainty about expected technological or regulatory events and/or their consequences, experimental regulations can be a fitting approach in dealing with the new challenge – as with UAS. As the risk of failure is an intrinsic aspect of innovation, the most significant function of regulatory experimentation is to yield useful information rather than verify the validity of an innovation. Nevertheless, the setting of experimental regulation should take into account both epistemic requirements and legal values. The principles of certainty, equality and proportionality express the legal values that guide decision-making towards legitimate experimental regulation. The experimental approach demonstrated in this article also provides a model of ‘future-proof’ regulation. This is applied to UAS particularly by zones as experimenting by derogation and perhaps also by devolution and open texture