Introduction: climate, energy, and environmental justices and transitions—rethinking global environmental law

This special issue of the Yearbook of International Environmental Law brings together a curated selection of papers from the seventh International Conference on Climate, Energy, and Environmental Justices and Transitions, held at the European University Institute in July 2023. Drawing on interdisciplinary and multi-methodological approaches—ranging from doctrinal legal analysis to empirical research—the collected articles interrogate how international, EU, and domestic legal frameworks respond to the compounding crises of climate change, energy transition, and environmental degradation. The contributions engage with theoretical paradigms including consumer sovereignty and moral responsibility, the expanding role of courts in climate governance, the limits of state-centric international law in addressing planetary boundaries, gaps in the CITES framework for combating illegal wildlife trade, EU energy storage and corporate sustainability reporting regimes, and the potential of customary land tenure systems to resist harmful land acquisitions in the Global South. Collectively, these articles advance just transition scholarship beyond its traditional distributive and procedural concerns toward recognition, restoration, and cosmopolitan solidarity, while highlighting a persistent tension between institutional innovation and the structural inertia that constrains meaningful legal transformation. The issue argues that no single doctrine, institution, or legal order can adequately address these transnational challenges alone, calling instead for coordinated, multi-scalar governance responses that hold legal aspiration accountable to institutional reality.

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Yearbook of International Environmental Law following peer review. The version of record

Introduction: Climate, Energy, and Environmental Justices and Transitions—Rethinking Global Environmental Law. Lucila de Almeida , Caroline Cox , Penny Giosa , Belen Olmos Giupponi. Yearbook of International Environmental Law, Volume 36, Issue 1, 2025, yvag010

is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/yiel/yvag010

Volume 36, Issue 1, 2025