Currents

This Article will explore the little-known legal tools that North Korea has adopted in order to address environmental issues, with a specific focus on the Environmental Protection Law (1986) and the Environmental Impact Assessment Law (2005), because environmental impact assessment can serve as a barometer of the socialist country’s environmental policy.

Popular news outlets have effectively covered how homeowners living in high fire risk areas find it increasingly difficult to obtain property insurance. However, there is very little public discussion of, and little scholarship on, how California’s rules against using current and future risk data – including cutting edge climate science – in insurance premiums contributes to this difficulty.

While much attention is shed upon the climate crisis, intimately intertwined—and arguably a bigger threat to human stability—is the biodiversity crisis. In particular, current industrial agricultural systems accelerate biodiversity loss and amplify climate change, which in turn intensifies widespread food insecurity and has left over 800 million people without adequate nutrition. To combat these intertwining crises, global scale policy is imperative to encourage agricultural practices that sustain the earth’s fragile ecosystem and equitably support communities that depend on it.

Subnational governments, working with non-governmental advocates, drove climate action during the Trump administration while rebuffing federal rollbacks. Under the Biden administration, focus may initially shift towards the federal government, but the subnational network is critical to continued progress on climate change. I use the term “networked federalism” to describe how a horizontal, interconnected, and polycentric collection of states, local governments, Tribes, and advocates provides the resilient frame needed to buttress national action. Indeed, this structure mirrors the successful structure of the Paris Agreement —in which international action depends on subsidiary national contributions. A networked, federalist system of subnational climate action will be critical to continuing success, and should be nurtured and expanded. In this article, I discuss barriers to federal climate action under the Biden administration, trace the important role of subnationals in the climate movement, and lay out a policy agenda for strengthening subnational networks over the next four years.