Introduction: Climate, Energy, and Environmental Justices and Transitions—Rethinking Global Environmental Law

The convergence of accelerating climate change, systemic ecological degradation, and the socio-legal imperatives of a just transition has generated one of the most demanding intellectual challenges facing contemporary international environmental legal scholarship. Climate change and the onset of events linked to extreme climatic weather may prompt the next global crisis. In a post-COVID context, this emphasizes the need to properly address emerging transnational environmental challenges and, at the same time, operate speedy and just energy transitions. It is within this context of compounding urgency that this special issue of the Yearbook of International Environmental Law was conceived—as a scholarly forum in which leading legal and interdisciplinary academics might interrogate the varieties of legal responses to global environmental problems and examine their distributional, procedural, and restorative consequences. The selected papers were presented at the seventh International Conference on Climate, Energy, and Environmental Justices and Transitions, co-organized by the Florence School of Regulation and the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and hosted at the European University Institute on 6–7 July 2023, under the overarching themes of climate, energy, and environmental justices and transitions: rethinking global environmental law.