From Transplantation to Anticipation: Challenges for Environmental Law in a No-Analogue Future

Legal transplantation has globalised environmental law. Domestic environmental laws have incorporated international law principles, such as the principle of ecologically sustainable development. There has also been a high degree of borrowing or cross-fertilization of legal approaches from countries with apparently advanced regimes for pollution control, conservation, and natural resource use and exploitation, to those with more nascent governance arrangements. This chapter questions the ongoing value of such a legal transplantation model in a future of rapid anthropogenic environmental change. It maps the aspects of environmental regulation and governance that are the product of transplantation before outlining the ways in which those approaches and principles are challenged by the speed and scale of change portended for the future. The chapter concludes with suggestions for how environmental law should develop when there is no historical analogue for the future ahead