Abstract

This paper argues that international environmental law (IEL) is not sufficiently ambitious to confront the Anthropocene’s socio-ecological crisis. The paper specifically focuses on IEL’s lack of ambitious but “unmentionable” ecological norms such as rights of nature, Earth system integrity, and ecological sustainability that are not yet considered to be part of the corpus of IEL, but that arguably should be. Assuming that the recent Global Pact for the Environment initiative and its accompanying United Nations-mandated report that assesses possible gaps in IEL are indicative of the type of reforms we might expect of IEL in future, the paper then determines if and the extent to which these embrace ambitious norms and address IEL’s “unmentionable” ecological normative gaps. A secondary, but related, objective of the paper
is to briefly respond to the emerging view that any radical critique of the Global Pact initiative is either unfounded, unwarranted or undesirable.