It appears that climate change and its effects are to worsen, because the commitment from the international community to make the structural changes needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions adequately is not yet sufficient. Uncertainties posed by continuing trends towards climate change create global challenges for adaptation, including the legal and governance tools to facilitate adaptation. In short, international legal frameworks have not yet solved the problems posed by climate change and will probably continue to find it difficult to solve them. Apparent weak sanctioning frameworks or systems and the imperfect character of a large number of norms of international law can make it difficult to find solutions from a more global perspective. Summing up the arguments presented so far, it should be stressed that the planet is changing. And being true that this is not a new reality, because uncertainty always existed, the truth is that climate change is becoming a major challenge for territories and communities, especially for those who live in cities. Once urban areas are the most populated territories on Earth, their number of dwellers does not stop increasing, and a large number of cities are located in coastal regions; these places are particularly vulnerable to uncertainty. At this point, the capacity of social-ecological systems to adapt in a way to withstand disturbances, maintaining their original characteristics, must be enhanced. Territories and communities must be helped by law and governance to achieve resilience. To achieve that, international, regional and national law have been proposing, during the last decades, environmental rights as a possibility to face vulnerabilities. And in regards urban areas, Lefebvre even suggested a right to the city. Nonetheless, even if understood by some authors as meta-rules that guide legislators, administrative decision makers, and judges, environmental rights (and more specifically the constitutional ones) have demonstrated not to be sufficient for citizens to face uncertainty, and a number of territories and communities continue to become more and more vulnerable. The solutions hereby introduced consist of making use of adaptive law and its flexible tools in order to depart from a state of environmental rights and reach a state or condition of resilience justice. This intended reality would be a public law framework where decision-making, drafting legislation, and applying law would not be static nor crystallising (as well as their processes). It will accompany change and more easily respond to the uncertain disturbances and the feedback loops of social and natural life.

The Environment in the City and Social-Ecological Uncertainty

章节
发表日期：

2026年

查看全文

Tiago de Melo Cartaxo

摘要

It appears that climate change and its effects are to worsen, because the commitment from the international community to make the structural changes needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions adequately is not yet sufficient. Uncertainties posed by continuing trends towards climate change create global challenges for adaptation, including the legal and governance tools to facilitate adaptation. In short, international legal frameworks have not yet solved the problems posed by climate change and will probably continue to find it difficult to solve them. Apparent weak sanctioning frameworks or systems and the imperfect character of a large number of norms of international law can make it difficult to find solutions from a more global perspective. Summing up the arguments presented so far, it should be stressed that the planet is changing. And being true that this is not a new reality, because uncertainty always existed, the truth is that climate change is becoming a major challenge for territories and communities, especially for those who live in cities. Once urban areas are the most populated territories on Earth, their number of dwellers does not stop increasing, and a large number of cities are located in coastal regions; these places are particularly vulnerable to uncertainty. At this point, the capacity of social-ecological systems to adapt in a way to withstand disturbances, maintaining their original characteristics, must be enhanced. Territories and communities must be helped by law and governance to achieve resilience. To achieve that, international, regional and national law have been proposing, during the last decades, environmental rights as a possibility to face vulnerabilities. And in regards urban areas, Lefebvre even suggested a right to the city. Nonetheless, even if understood by some authors as meta-rules that guide legislators, administrative decision makers, and judges, environmental rights (and more specifically the constitutional ones) have demonstrated not to be sufficient for citizens to face uncertainty, and a number of territories and communities continue to become more and more vulnerable. The solutions hereby introduced consist of making use of adaptive law and its flexible tools in order to depart from a state of environmental rights and reach a state or condition of resilience justice. This intended reality would be a public law framework where decision-making, drafting legislation, and applying law would not be static nor crystallising (as well as their processes). It will accompany change and more easily respond to the uncertain disturbances and the feedback loops of social and natural life.