Climate change, biodiversity loss, marine degradation and a pandemic have marked 2020. This article introduces a Special Issue that interrogates transnational environmental law in the context of the Anthropocene and invites reflection on the meaning and role of law in light of changing planetary realties. How law interacts with and governs the global environmental problems is a challenge that legal scholars have approached with vigour over the last decade and, more recently, the concept of the Anthropocene has become a topic that researchers have also begun to grapple with. One avenue of research that has emerged to address global environmental problems is transnational environmental law. Adopting 'transnational law' as a lens or framework through which to analyse environmental law takes a broader approach to the ways in which law may be assessed and deployed to meet global environmental challenges. The collection of articles within this Special Issue provide a timely intervention into the theoretical and practical approaches of transnational environmental law in a time of significant global uncertainty and environmental crisis. KEYWORDS Transnational environmental law; Anthropocene; transnational law; legal theory [L]et us call it a conflict between modern humans who believe they are alone in the Holocene, in flight towards the Global or in exodus towards the Local, and the terrestrials who know they are in the Anthropocene and who seek to cohabit with other terrestrials under the authority of a power that as yet lacks any political institution. 1
Towards a new planetary epoch: from Holocene to Anthropocene?Today, some twenty years after its pronouncement, 2 for some, the term 'Anthropocene' has not lost its profoundness and radical
Since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the focus of the United Nations climate regime has shifted from forging consensus among national governments toward animating implementation activity across multiple levels. Based on a case study of the Global Climate Action Portal—an online database designed to document nonstate actor climate commitments and implementation efforts—we trace, conceptualize, and assess how the roles of data, data infrastructures, and actor constellations have changed as a result of this shift. We argue that in the pre-COP21 negotiation phase, the United Nations Climate Secretariat strategically used the database to orchestrate and leverage nonstate actor commitments to exert pressure on intergovernmental negotiations. By contrast, in the post-COP21 implementation phase, the Secretariat, in collaboration with climate data specialists, is seeking to develop the portal to track and animate implementation activity. Given these developments, we discuss the potential and limitations of data-driven climate governance and set out avenues for future research.
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