Climate change has evolved from being a controversial issue to a widely recognized global threat over time. The inclusion of climate action as one of the 17 United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals, 1 the conclusion of the 2015 Paris Agreement, 2 and the publication in 2018 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C 3 have forged an agreement among the international community on the causes and risks of climate change. At the national level, a surge of laws codifying national and international responses to climate change has given rise to a growing number of lawsuits around the world on climate change-related matters. 4 The topic of climate litigation has attracted the attention of scholars from across social sciences fields, including most prominently the legal discipline and political science. 5 Legal scholarship on climate litigation covers a broad scope
This article analyses contractual governance practices within the value chains of large companies based in the USA and Europe between 2012 and 2017 with focus on human and labour rights. In line with the existing scholarship, we find that the use of contractual governance for safeguarding human and labour rights is best practice among large American and European businesses. The results show that value chain contractual governance should be studied in an interdisciplinary environment taking both legal and non-legal aspects into consideration. Moreover, we detect a general positive impact of the business and human rights regulatory wave of 2010-2011 on sustainable contractual governance practices.
When medicines enter the environment, they harm living species and ecosystems. Improper disposal of household pharmaceutical waste increases the concentration of pharmaceuticals in the environment and thus their detrimental impacts. Since 2004, the EU has obliged its Member States to establish ‘an appropriate collection system’ for unused and/or expired medication. However, as no implementation guidelines exist, large differences in the systems and their use remain. Pressure for adoption of guidelines harmonising the systems across the EU has been increasing. We address the question whether such harmonisation could mitigate pharmaceutical pollution, and which regulatory measures would be appropriate. To answer this, we conduct a comparative investigation of the systems’ regulation and an empirical study of citizens’ beliefs and behaviour across four European countries. We find a potential for increasing the effectiveness of pharmaceutical take-back systems through their harmonisation and conclude that the EU has the competence and tools to regulate this.
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