Louis J. Kotzé

Sustainable Development Goals

Goal -1 No Poverty In 2013, an estimated 385 million children lived on less than US

Arguing Global Environmental Constitutionalism

1.90 per day. Still, these figures are unreliable due to huge gaps in data on the status of children worldwide. On average, 97 percent of countries have insufficient data to determine the state of impoverished children and make projections towards SDG Goal 1, and 63 percent of countries have no data on child poverty at all. By 2030, eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere.

Rethinking global environmental law and governance in the Antrhopocene

The current global environmental law and governance regime has been designed primarily to attend to the worsening ecological crisis. Evidence, however, suggests that the regime is far from achieving its goal and it is failing in its efforts to solve what people perceive to be pervasive global environmental problems. There is little doubt that this regime is in need of urgent reforms and/or re-situation in a decidedly different paradigm. This article proposes that global constitutionalism, while no panacea, could contribute to these paradigm-shifting reforms by providing a new perspective through which to view the current deficient global environmental law and governance regime and, in real terms, ameliorating some of the deficiencies of the regime through a normative process of constitutionalization.

Human rights and the environment in the Anthropocene

The word Anthropocene describes a new geological epoch that follows the Holocene epoch. It is the signifier of the period in which people have a devastating and overwhelming impact on the earth and its systems. The Anthropocene also describes the new context in which we are going to have to consider how we should deal with the effects of global anthropogenic ecological change, including how we think about natural resources and energy security. This will require new perspectives on and reimagining orthodox social institutional constructs such as global environmental law and governance, among others, and their ability to successfully mediate the human-environment interface. This article reflects on how we will have to rethink global environmental law and governance as a result of the Anthropocene. It specifically attempts to identify a host of considerations that environmental lawyers, including those who focus on natural resources and energy law, will have to contemplate if global environmental law and governance were to respond better to the many challenges and complexities in the Anthropocene epoch. At a more general level, the article endeavours to introduce the Anthropocene into the environmental law and governance domain as a new discursive context that could hopefully assist in the appropriate future development of global environmental law and governance.

Research handbook on human rights and the environment

Human rights are considered ethical demands that operate at an elevated juridical level. They have become popular legal constructs that contribute to the traditional instrumentalist and the more esoteric functions of law. While there is often considerable criticism leveled against human rights, as creatures of law and as legal mechanisms possessing unique characteristics, they are also uniquely situated and able to perform a singular mediating role in the human–environment interface. The recent mushrooming of rights to a healthy environment, environmental-related procedural rights and other substantive political and socio-economic rights bearing on environmental interests, is testimony to their increasing popularity. Yet, despite their prevalence in the environmental regulatory domain, the arrival of the Anthropocene is possibly set to require a complete rethink of the way in which we use human rights to mediate the human–environment interface. This is because the Anthropocene presents an urgent call for dramatic regulatory interventions of a kind hitherto unseen. Accepting the continuing prevalence of human rights as part of the environmental regulatory domain, this article argues that there is every reason to believe that their traditional role, nature, objectives and construction should change because of the Anthropocene. The article carries this argument by discussing the Anthropocene and its features that might influence conceptions of human rights and the environment as they are currently embedded in the social institutions of environmental law and governance. The argument then uses climate change as a useful explanatory context to identify and to understand the different types of rights issues that might arise in the Anthropocene. The next part of the discussion then takes stock of human rights in the environmental context by evaluating the way in which they currently mediate the human–environment interface. The article concludes with suggestions founding a re-imagination of the relationship between human rights and the environment in the Anthropocene.

Somewhere between Rhetoric and Reality: Environmental Constitutionalism and the Rights of Nature in Ecuador

Bringing together leading international scholars in the field, this Research Handbook interrogates, from various angles and positions, the fractious relationship between human rights and the environment and between human rights and environmental law. The Handbook provides researchers and students with a fertile source of reflection and engagement with this most important of contemporary legal relationships. Law’s complex role in the mediation of the relationship between humanity and the living order is richly reflected in this timely and authoritative collection.

Transboundary governance of biodiversity

Today, numerous constitutions provide for a rights-based approach to environmental protection. Based as they are on an instrumentalist rationality that seeks to promote human entitlements to nature, the majority of these rights remain anthropocentric. Although there are growing calls within academic and activist circles to reorient rights alongside an ecocentric ontology, only one country to date has taken the bold step to bestow rights on nature in its constitution. The Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008 announces the transition from a juridical anthropocentric orientation to an ecocentric position by recognizing enforceable rights of nature. This article critically reflects on the legal significance of granting rights to nature, with specific reference to Ecuador’s constitutional experiment. It first provides a contextual description of rights in an attempt to illustrate their anthropogenic genesis, and then explores the notion of environmental rights. The following part traces the discourse that has developed over the years in relation to the rights of nature by revealing aspects of an ecocentric counter-narrative. The final part focuses specifically on the Ecuadorian constitutional regime and provides (i) a historical-contextual discussion of the events that led to the adoption of the rights of nature; (ii) an analysis of the constitutional provisions directly and indirectly related to the rights of nature; and (iii) a critical appraisal of whether those provisions, so far, measure up to the rhetoric of constitutional ecocentric rights of nature in that country.

The Heat is On: Local Government and Climate Governance in South Africa

Part 1: General issues Chapter 1: Introduction (Louis J. Kotze and Thilo Marauhn) Chapter 2: Transboundary Environmental Governance of Biodiversity in the Anthropocene (Louis J. Kotze) Chapter 3: The Concept of Public Trusteeship in the Transboundary Governance of Biodiversity (Peter H. Sand) Chapter 4: Transfrontier Protection of the Natural Environment, Globalization and State Sovereignty (Francois Venter) Chapter 5: An Ecosystem Approach to the Transboundary Protection of Biodiversity (Thilo Marauhn and Ayse-Martina Bohringer) Part 2: Supranational perspectives Chapter 6: Universal Transboundary Protection of Biodiversity and its Impact on the Low-level Transboundary Protection of Wildlife (Ulrich Beyerlin) Chapter 7: European Regional Approaches to the Transboundary Conservation of Biodiversity: the Bern Convention and the EU Birds and Habitats Directives (Floor Fleurke and Arie Trouwborst) Chapter 8: Protected Areas Governance in a Southern African Transfrontier Context (Alexander Paterson) Chapter 9: A Legal Appraisal of the SADC Normative Framework related to Biodiversity Conservation in TFCAs (Niel Lubbe) Part 3: Selected issues Chapter 10: From North to South: Legal Pathways to Stimulate Biodiversity Conservation in Developing Countries through Transboundary Trade in Biodiversity Resources (Jonathan Verschuuren) Chapter 11: Southern African Perspectives on the Relationship between Transfrontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) and the Protection of Rights (Anel Du Plessis and Willemien Du Plessis) Chapter 12: Rural People in Southern African Transfrontier Conservation Areas: A Question of Governance (Clara Bocchino) Chapter 13: Access to Bio-energy vis-a-vis Biodiversity Conservation in SADC: Conflicting Objectives? (Michelle Barnard) Chapter 14: Transboundary Protection of Biodiversity in the Context of Human and Environmental Security and Climate Change (Dewald van Niekerk and Leandri Hildebrandt)

Constitutional Conversations in the Anthropocene: In Search of Environmental Jus Cogens Norms

Departing from the fact that climate change poses localized effects, this article critically considers from a legal perspective the role of local authorities in the South African government’s response to climate change. A brief review of the relevance of climate mitigation and adaptation is followed by an explanation of what these concepts mean for local government. The article then discusses the extent to which the country’s environmental and local government law and policy framework provides for municipalities’ participation and involvement in climate governance. The article identifies strengths and weaknesses in relation to the local sphere of government’s formal involvement in climate governance vis-a-vis authorities in the provincial and national spheres. It concludes that, as a result of their proximity to the effects of climate change, municipalities have a critically important role to play in the climate governance effort, despite the patchwork of environmental and local government laws and lack of explicit, consolidated policy and legal arrangements

The south african environment and the 1996 Constitution

This chapter investigates the existence of environmental jus cogens norms and the possibility of extending peremptory norms into the environmental domain. For this purpose, the chapter briefly describes the trite manifestation and use of jus cogens in international law. It then surveys the current doctrinal state of the art to determine to what extent it could be said that certain norms may or may not have attained the status of jus cogens in the international environmental law (IEL) domain. The latter analysis is then extended to present the reasons for and possible obstacles currently countering, from a theoretical and practical point of view, the adoption of environmental jus cogens norms. The final part of the chapter follows a re-imaginary approach to determine which IEL norms could in future qualify for jus cogens status through the lens of the informally proposed Anthropocene geological epoch.