Hasil untuk "Environmental law"

Stanić Miloš, Galić Borislav

Society is undergoing rapid transformation, posing significant challenges to legal systems worldwide. A central aspect of this transformation is the development of artificial intelligence (AI). At the same time, the right to a healthy environment, guaranteed by the constitution worldwide, is a fundamental human right and concerns all citizens, because everyone affects the state of the environment. The authors in this paper, after introducing the concept of artificial intelligence itself, first deal with the current normative state of the art in this area, both at the level of international public law and at the level of domestic legal orders. After that, the importance of environmental protection, the legal framework for its protection, and the norms regarding the use of artificial intelligence in environmental protection are presented, with an appropriate conclusion.

Lei Zhao, Ruitao Zhao

Strengthening the rule of law is the cornerstone of ecological environmental protection. In the context of sustainable development, countries generally recognize the key role of the legal system in the protection of the ecological environment. Based on the perspectives of management, economics, and jurisprudence, this paper explores the impact and internal mechanism of the ecological legal system represented by the environmental protection court on the green innovation of enterprises. The study revealed that the ecological rule of law elevates enterprises' green innovation. The cost of environmental investment and enterprise strategy adjustment both reinforce the impact of the ecological rule of law on enterprises' green innovation. In the external environment of enterprises, the ecological rule of law on enterprises' green innovation has a more pronounced influence when Officials' appraisal pressure is high, and both the public and the government attach great importance to the environment. Within the internal environment of the enterprise, the ecological rule of law exerts a weaker force on the green innovation of the enterprise when the executives possess a low level of education, exhibits weak environmental awareness, and has a low shareholding ratio. The outcomes of this study might offer valuable insights for policymakers and enterprise managers in implementing environmental policies and in planning long-term green innovation for enterprises. Contribute to the strengthening of the legal system for ecological environmental protection in all countries.

Bence Lukács, Péter Molnár

Abstract The growing integration of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors into corporate decision-making and investment strategies has heightened the need for reliable and comparable ESG ratings. However, substantial divergence across rating agencies—driven by inconsistent methodologies, weighting schemes, and disclosure practices—poses challenges for investors, firms, and regulators. Addressing a key gap in the literature, this study investigates how regulatory environments influence ESG rating divergence by comparing hard, soft, and unregulated frameworks across five major economies: the United States, China, Japan, Germany, and India. ESG ratings were collected from Sustainalytics, S&P Global, and Refinitiv for the top 50 publicly listed companies in each country. The divergence was measured using absolute score differences between agencies, and statistical tests and cluster analysis were conducted to evaluate the impact of regulation on rating consistency. The results indicate that countries with strong, mandatory ESG disclosure regimes—such as Germany's CSRD and India’s BRSR—exhibit significantly lower levels of rating divergence, while unregulated markets like the USA and China display the highest discrepancies. Notably, Japan’s soft-law approach achieves alignment levels comparable to those of hard-law environments, emphasizing the role of regulatory enforcement. These findings reinforce both signaling and agency theories by demonstrating how regulatory oversight and transparency reduce information asymmetry and promote stakeholder trust. The study highlights the importance of direct supervision of ESG rating agencies and supports global harmonization of ESG disclosure standards as a means to enhance market efficiency and comparability.

Janneke Gerards, Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius

Algorithmic decision-making and similar types of artificial intelligence (AI) may lead to improvements in all sectors of society, but can also have discriminatory effects. While current non-discrimination law offers people some protection, algorithmic decision-making presents the law with several challenges. For instance, algorithms can generate new categories of people based on seemingly innocuous characteristics, such as web browser preference or apartment number, or more complicated categories combining many data points. Such new types of differentiation could evade non-discrimination law, as browser type and house number are not protected characteristics, but such differentiation could still be unfair, for instance if it reinforces social inequality. This paper explores which system of non-discrimination law can best be applied to algorithmic decision-making, considering that algorithms can differentiate on the basis of characteristics that do not correlate with protected grounds of discrimination such as ethnicity or gender. The paper analyses the current loopholes in the protection offered by non-discrimination law and explores the best way for lawmakers to approach algorithmic differentiation. While we focus on Europe, the conceptual and theoretical focus of the paper can make it useful for scholars and policymakers from other regions too, as they encounter similar problems with algorithmic decision-making.

Madelyne Xiao, Andrew Sellars, Sarah Scheffler

Computer science research sometimes brushes with the law, from red-team exercises that probe the boundaries of authentication mechanisms, to AI research processing copyrighted material, to platform research measuring the behavior of algorithms and users. U.S.-based computer security research is no stranger to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in a relationship that is still evolving through case law, research practices, changing policies, and legislation. Amid the landscape computer scientists, lawyers, and policymakers have learned to navigate, anti-fraud laws are a surprisingly under-examined challenge for computer science research. Fraud brings separate issues that are not addressed by the methods for navigating CFAA, DMCA, and Terms of Service that are more familiar in the computer security literature. Although anti-fraud laws have been discussed to a limited extent in older research on phishing attacks, modern computer science researchers are left with little guidance when it comes to navigating issues of deception outside the context of pure laboratory research. In this paper, we analyze and taxonomize the anti-fraud and deception issues that arise in several areas of computer science research. We find that, despite the lack of attention to these issues in the legal and computer science literature, issues of misrepresented identity or false information that could implicate anti-fraud laws are actually relevant to many methodologies used in computer science research, including penetration testing, web scraping, user studies, sock puppets, social engineering, auditing AI or socio-technical systems, and attacks on artificial intelligence. We especially highlight the importance of anti-fraud laws in two research fields of great policy importance: attacking or auditing AI systems, and research involving legal identification.

Xiangyu Lyu, Hongyu Chen, En-Kun Li et al.

The space-borne gravitational wave detectors such as TianQin offers a new window to test General Relativity by observing the early inspiral phase of stellar-mass binary black holes. A key concern arises if these stellar-mass binary black holes reside in gaseous environments such as active galactic nucleus accretion disks, where environmental effects imprint detectable modulations on the gravitational waveform. Using Bayesian inference on simulated signals containing both environmental and dipole deviation, we have assessed the extent to which the presence of environmental effects affects the detectability of dipole radiation. Our results demonstrate that even in the presence of strong environmental coupling, the dipole parameter can be recovered with high precision, and the evidence for dipole radiation remains distinguishable. Crucially, we find that the existence of environmental effects does not fundamentally impede the identification of dipole radiation, provided both effects are simultaneously modelled in the inference process. This study establishes that future tests of modified gravity with space-borne observatories can remain robust even for sources in astrophysical environments.

Julian Schön, Lena Hoffmann, Nikolas Becker

Artificial intelligence (AI) is often presented as a key tool for addressing societal challenges, such as climate change. At the same time, AI's environmental footprint is expanding increasingly. This report describes the systemic environmental risks of artificial intelligence, in particular, moving beyond direct impacts such as energy and water usage. Systemic environmental risks of AI are emergent, cross-sector harms to climate, biodiversity, freshwater, and broader socioecological systems that arise primarily from AI's integration into social, economic, and physical infrastructures, rather than its direct resource use, and that propagate through feedbacks, yielding nonlinear, inequitable, and potentially irreversible impacts. While these risks are emergent and quantification is uncertain, this report aims to provide an overview of systemic environmental risks. Drawing on a narrative literature review, we propose a three-level framework that operationalizes systemic risk analysis. The framework identifies the structural conditions that shape AI development, the risk amplification mechanisms that propagate environmental harm, and the impacts that manifest as observable ecological and social consequences. We illustrate the framework in expert-interview-based case studies across agriculture and biodiversity, oil and gas, and waste management.

Jose Marie Antonio Minoza, Rex Gregor Laylo, Christian F Villarin et al.

Machine learning inference occurs at a massive scale, yet its environmental impact remains poorly quantified, especially on low-resource hardware. We present ML-EcoLyzer, a cross-framework tool for measuring the carbon, energy, thermal, and water costs of inference across CPUs, consumer GPUs, and datacenter accelerators. The tool supports both classical and modern models, applying adaptive monitoring and hardware-aware evaluation. We introduce the Environmental Sustainability Score (ESS), which quantifies the number of effective parameters served per gram of CO$_2$ emitted. Our evaluation covers over 1,900 inference configurations, spanning diverse model architectures, task modalities (text, vision, audio, tabular), hardware types, and precision levels. These rigorous and reliable measurements demonstrate that quantization enhances ESS, huge accelerators can be inefficient for lightweight applications, and even small models may incur significant costs when implemented suboptimally. ML-EcoLyzer sets a standard for sustainability-conscious model selection and offers an extensive empirical evaluation of environmental costs during inference.

Yedong Zhang

Although "climate litigation" is not an indigenous term in China, localizing it is essential to support the development of an independent environmental legal knowledge system in China. Rooted in China's judicial tradition, which emphasizes substantive rationality, traditional legal theories have primarily focused on environmental law. However, the contemporary practices in the rule of law have created an unclear trajectory for climate litigation. Research in this area has long been trapped in a paradigm that relies on lawsuits for ecological environmental damage compensation and environmental public interest litigation, leading to a significant disconnect between theoretical frameworks and practical application. With the advancement of the "dual carbon" strategic goals-carbon peaking and carbon neutrality-it has become imperative to redefine the concept of climate litigation within the Chinese context. We need to establish a theoretical framework that aligns with the "dual carbon" objectives while providing theoretical and institutional support for climate litigation, ultimately contributing to the international discourse on climate justice. Additionally, Hong Kong's proactive climate governance and robust ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) practices provide valuable insights for developing comprehensive climate litigation mechanisms. Based on this analysis, we propose concrete plans for building a climate litigation system in China, establishing a preventive relief system and a multi-source legal framework at the substantive level and developing climate judicial mechanisms for mitigation and adaptation at the procedural level.

Larionov Arkadij, Smirnova Elena

At present, the threat of technogenesis is not weakening despite the measures taken to reduce the levels of negative impact on the environment. In this regard, the authors analyze the standardization of risk management as an effective tool for monitoring the safety of not only design decisions in housing construction, but also any economic activity. The article discusses the safety aspects set out in Russian standards (GOSTs) and international guidelines. The analyzed regulatory documentation answers the question of how to achieve an acceptable level of risk. The basic concepts of risk assessment are given. There are positive changes in state standards in the safety area. Federal Law N7 regulates the leadership of the employer, and not his responsibility. As part of the improvement of environmental management for housing construction, the use of certain penalties, interest fines and forfeits looks quite natural. The main goal of the international standard ISO 14001 is not to point out the need for managers to have leadership qualities as the main factor in ensuring environmental safety for the construction industry, but to form a responsible attitude towards the environment and natural resources as the most important asset of economic activity. The article raises the issue that risk analysts cannot be fully guided by domestic standards due to their lack of development and inconsistency with the universal international documents ISO 31000:2018 "Risk management - Guidelines" and ISO 14001:2016 "Environmental management systems". A special risk assessment approach should be developed that describes the interaction of various scenarios, which will provide an increased environmental and economic effect in the field of housing construction safety.

Israel Pedro Dias Ribeiro, Mônica de Moura Pires, Andrea da Silva Gomes

O presente trabalho pretende identificar potencialidades e fragilidades na gestão ambiental dos municípios da Chapada Diamantina, na Bahia, para a implementação do instrumento de Pagamento por Serviços Ambientais (PSA) como política pública de desenvolvimento local e regional. Especificamente, objetiva-se identificar a existência de iniciativas ou articulações para a formulação e/ou implementação do PSA na região, caracterizar os principais aspectos e desafios vivenciados por esses municípios no tocante à gestão ambiental e analisar as fortalezas, fraquezas, oportunidades e ameaças relacionadas ao PSA, a fim de discutir estratégias para a sua promoção. Quanto à metodologia, foram empregados os procedimentos de pesquisa bibliográfica e pesquisa documental. As técnicas de análise de conteúdo e análise SWOT foram utilizadas para a interpretação dos resultados. Verifica-se que a implementação da política de PSA na Chapada Diamantina representa um grande desafio para a gestão ambiental, tendo em vista as dificuldades institucionais e as fortes restrições financeiras enfrentadas pelos municípios, apesar das potencialidades ambientais constatadas. Assim, para promover a difusão do PSA na região, sugerem-se ações coordenadas entre as esferas governamentais e os diversos atores políticos e sociais envolvidos, bem como a integração entre políticas ambientais, considerando a complexidade do cenário de implementação da política pública em questão.

Wang Yunming, Chen Wenzhe, Hu Zuhui et al.

While global climate risk is increasing substantially with greenhouse gas emission, energy transition is a key approach to alleviate this concern. This paper constructs the difference in difference model (DID) and the difference-in-differences based propensity score matching model (PSM-DID) to estimate the effects of China’s Environmental Protection Tax Law on energy transition and its transmission path. The empirical results show that (1) China’s Environmental Protection Tax Law can promote energy transition through electrification, and this conclusion is still valid after a series of robustness tests. (2) China’s Environmental Protection Tax Law can facilitate energy transition by improving both the quantity and the quality of industrial structure upgrading. The findings of this paper not only enrich the literature on the energy transition and environmental tax designs in developing countries but also provide an empirical reference for the government to promote energy transition orderly by implementing environmental tax.

Pranav Gupta, Raunak Sharma, Rashmi Kumari et al.

Environment Sound Classification has been a well-studied research problem in the field of signal processing and up till now more focus has been laid on fully supervised approaches. Over the last few years, focus has moved towards semi-supervised methods which concentrate on the utilization of unlabeled data, and self-supervised methods which learn the intermediate representation through pretext task or contrastive learning. However, both approaches require a vast amount of unlabelled data to improve performance. In this work, we propose a novel framework called Environmental Sound Classification with Hierarchical Ontology-guided semi-supervised Learning (ECHO) that utilizes label ontology-based hierarchy to learn semantic representation by defining a novel pretext task. In the pretext task, the model tries to predict coarse labels defined by the Large Language Model (LLM) based on ground truth label ontology. The trained model is further fine-tuned in a supervised way to predict the actual task. Our proposed novel semi-supervised framework achieves an accuracy improvement in the range of 1\% to 8\% over baseline systems across three datasets namely UrbanSound8K, ESC-10, and ESC-50.

Mohammed Rashid Al-Hassan Al-Sulaiti

 Book Review “Environmental Law in Arab States” by Damilola Olawuyi* Reviewed by: Mohammed Rashid Al-Hassan Al-Sulaiti

Nilay Tulukcu Yildizbas, Hülya Kılıç Hernandez, Hülya Yıldırım et al.

The current study emphasizes the inherent shortcomings of laws and policy approaches that are based on the premise that by increasing wood production, much more emission credits can be achieved by using wood in alternative uses. The article aims to exploit the financing of emission reductions, discuss how carbon sinks held in forest resources can be activated, traded, and financed, and explain how Turkiye's forest carbon potential can be exploited. To make a comparative analysis of the situation of Turkiye at global level, Russian’s potential for carbon sequestration and its trade have been dealt with as a comparison by following quantitative research methodology.  In this research, the calculation method has been used to determine the number of houses that are likely to be built in rural areas using wood materials, e.g., the construction of 100,000 houses with a construction area of 100 m2 per year. Consequently, the forest carbon generated by alternative scenarios contributes positively to the emission balance sheet, as well as climate change mitigation through carbon emission trade despite all legal and technical constraints. Although both countries have similar shortcomings of obtaining carbon credits and its trade, of course Russia has a promising situation in comparison with Turkiye with respect to the amount of carbon sequestered and the likelihood of its trade potential at global level.

Ratna Chrismiari Purwestri, Petra Palátová, Miroslav Hájek et al.

Abstract In recent years, there has been growing interest in public valuation for forest ecosystem services in policymaking. This paper investigates the public’s perception of the Czech forest ecosystem services, i.e., provisioning, regulating and cultural services, with associated factors (changes in forest cover, production, and respondents’ characteristics). The performance perception of forest ecosystem services was gathered from a nationwide survey in 2020. The Coordination of Information on the Environment Land Cover information in 2000 and 2018 was used for observation of forest cover changes. Coniferous and non-coniferous (broadleaved) roundwood, mushroom, and bilberry production data from the observed years were acquired from the Czech Statistical Office and the Ministry of Agriculture’s annual nationwide surveys. The Bohemia vs. Moravia study areas were also statistically compared. Predictor analysis of the high score of performance perception from individual and cluster forest ecosystems was also performed to answer the research objectives. The group of forest provisioning services received high scores in public evaluation (from 3.9 to 4.2), followed by regulating services (mean range: 3.7–4.1). The highest score was found in forest as a natural habitat for wild animals and plants (mean: 4.6). However, the lowest value was the esthetic value (mean: 2.3). Both are categorized as forest cultural services. The broadleaved and mixed forest areas in 2018 were significantly higher than in 2000, especially in Bohemia. Meanwhile, the total coniferous forested region in 2018 declined substantially compared to 2000 (p = 0.030), especially in Moravian areas. A significantly higher total production of the coniferous and broadleaved roundwood removals in 2018 than in 2000 was reported, in contrast to a marked decrease in collected mushrooms and bilberries. The high score of performance perception of forests as the wood provisioning service was positively and significantly associated with the changes in broadleaved roundwood removals. Older-age and female respondents were the primary predictors of the studied cluster and individual forest ecosystem services. The findings indicate that the social value of the individual forest provisioning services supports the implementation of multi-species and multi-purpose forests; hence, it encourages the implementation of the current Czech forest policy.

Rakhyun E. Kim, Catherine Blanchard, Louis J. Kotzé

Stanislav Fedorenko, Lesya Vasylenko, Yuliia Bereznytska et al.

The development of environmental management in Ukraine is determined by the urgent need to overcome environmental problems and ensure the environmental safety of society, especially under the conditions of martial law. Today, the domestic economy is three times more resource-intensive than the world economy, the technological base and infrastructure complex of public production are rapidly wearing out, which leads to a decrease in the level of technological and environmental safety. Environmental management is related to the national economy and forms information about the need to use natural resources when promoting effective development. A comprehensive project-targeted approach to the development of new forms of ownership and market economy reflects the interrelationship of all parts of the nature management project. The development of the scientific foundations of nature management is facilitated by the formulation of a general plan for the placement of productive forces. The ecological situation in Ukraine has long been called a crisis. In recent decades, new scientific directions have appeared, the result of which have been new ideas about human, society and nature and their coexistence. One of these directions is environmental management, which today is the ideology of production activity management, as it provides an effective toolkit for solving current problems and preventing the emergence of new production environmental and economic issues.

Feras A. Batarseh

Cybersecurity threats affect all aspects of society; critical infrastructures (such as networks, corporate systems, water supply systems, and intelligent transportation systems) are especially prone to attacks and can have tangible negative consequences on society. However, these critical cyber systems are generally governed by multiple jurisdictions, for instance the Metro in the Washington, D.C. area is managed by the states of Virginia and Maryland, as well as the District of Columbia (DC) through Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA). Additionally, the water treatment infrastructure managed by DC Water consists of waste water input from Fairfax and Arlington counties, and the district (i.e. DC). Additionally, cyber attacks usually launch from unknown sources, through unknown switches and servers, and end up at the destination without much knowledge on their source or path. Certain infrastructures are shared amongst multiple countries, another idiosyncrasy that exacerbates the issue of governance. This law paper however, is not concerned with the general governance of these infrastructures, rather with the ambiguity in the relevant laws or doctrines about which authority would prevail in the context of a cyber threat or a cyber-attack, with a focus on federal vs. state issues, international law involvement, federal preemption, technical aspects that could affect lawmaking, and conflicting responsibilities in cases of cyber crime. A legal analysis of previous cases is presented, as well as an extended discussion addressing different sides of the argument.

Tanja A. Börzel, A. Buzogány

ABSTRACT The European Union (EU) has become the main driver for environmental policy output for its member states whose number has more than tripled over the past four decades. The EU’s deepening and widening has led researchers to expect more non-compliance with EU environmental legislation. In fact, however, the implementation gap has narrowed over the past 25 years. Except for Southern enlargement, taking on new member states has not exacerbated the EU’s compliance problem in the field of environmental policy. Nor has the expansion of the environmental acquis. This is explained by the European Commission’s strategies of managing and enforcing compliance. EU environmental policy has become less demanding on member states since it increasingly tends to amend existing rather than set new legislation. Simultaneously, the Commission has developed new instruments to strengthen member state capacities to implement EU environmental legislation.