In 2014, British Columbia enacted the Water Sustainability Act, a comprehensive overhaul of its ground and surface water regimes. Meanwhile, in England more piecemeal changes have been made to existing groundwater laws and policies. Through developing a framework from groundwater governance and climate change adaptation literature this paper analyses the effectiveness of these reforms, which have been carried out through different methods and from different starting points. The paper goes on to considers how new processes and technologies, such as hydraulic fracturing (fracking), bring fresh challenges in aligning progress in groundwater law reforms with the wider policy framework.

Loss and damage from the impacts of climate change affect many countries and communities across the world. In 2013, the Warsaw Mechanism on Loss and Damage, created through the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (unfccc), established an institutional process to respond to such impacts. This paper aims to contribute to the growing literature on climate liability by outlining a normative framework based on international law that can be used as a guiding path for the mechanism. It is argued that addressing loss and damage in line with these core principles and international law is required to develop a robust and legitimate mechanism. This framework is then used to answer critical questions regarding an international loss and damage mechanism for climate change.

The chapter goes on to analyse a broader sphere of 'litigation in the context of climate change' 5 , rather than only what is generally defined as 'climate litigation' 6 . This includes litigation that brings forward issues that deal with mitigation and adaptation but do not necessarily expressly deal with 'climate change'. Indeed, a rich jurisprudence has developed where litigation has partially been successful in linking issues of rights, livelihoods, ecology and justice. Tracing this jurisprudence provides a broader understanding of litigation on climate change in the region.Accordingly, this chapter provides a fresh perspective to the current literature on climate litigation in India and Pakistan, through a more focussed analysis of climate litigation in the domestic political and legal context within which such litigation takes place. While legal commentators have identified the region for its climate litigation potential, this is often discussed in a decontextualized manner. 7 Much of the literature is comparative, or solely focuses on the Leghari judgement as a standalone leading case. 8 Drawing upon the broad legacy of the Courts, authors conclude the strong potential for climate litigation. While this may be true, as will be argued, the picture is slightly more complex and nuanced. The politics of climate change, discourse around climate change, the politics of the court, as well as developments in different types of litigation, are also important in explaining the opportunities and challenges for climate litigation in Pakistan and India. Ultimately, through understanding this context we can assess how future litigation can enact and implement substantive change. The lessons drawn in this chapter are also relevant to the growing literature on climate change litigation in the Global South where similar challenges are faced.

Global law and the environment is an increasingly prominent and rapidly evolving area of scholarship. In confronting global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, freshwater scarcity, and other symptoms of planetary breakdown, critical scholars from different intellectual traditions are questioning the traditional approach taken within environmental law which has, so far, only managed to save “some trees” but failed to keep “the forest”. These dominant legal interactions often use the law to address “problems” after they arrive. However, the law plays a key role also in constituting these “problems” by incentivizing certain harmful activities, upholding socio-political-economic structures, and through the limited framing of the issues it claims to solve. It is becoming increasingly clear that we live in a “legally constituted world”. Against this background, there is a need for further critical reflection on the role of the law in preventing, addressing, and even driving the entangled socio-ecological-economic crises of modernity. Through interrogating the assumptions that underlie environmental law, critical scholars have exposed, challenged, and put forward alternative visions to its neo-colonial and gendered biases; its exclusion of indigenous perspectives and voices; its construction upon problematic representations of “the environment” that centres an anthropocentric worldview; and a neoliberal economic order that fosters vast environmental damage.