Enshrining legal indicators for environmental law effectivity in the outcome documents of UNEP@50 and Stockholm+50
Almost everywhere, environmental law remains poorly applied despite considerable efforts to improve its effective implementation. The proposed legal indicators provide an innovative tool to help address this widespread application gap.
Mirroring the life of the law through the stages of its implementation, legal indicators are the driving force behind improved functioning of the law. They are meant to promote change, detect barriers and regressions, and identify levers for progress, based on a structured narrative of the causal chain of non-effectivity.
Importantly, the last IUCN World Congress, held in Marseille in 2021, adopted resolution 060, “Measuring the effectiveness of environmental law thanks to legal indicators”, which: (i) asked the IUCN World Commission on Environmental Law to develop experiments and training in the creation of legal indicators; (ii) recommended the addition of legal indicators to the existing SDG indicators; (iii) invited Parties to environmental conventions to use legal indicators for the assessment of their effectiveness through country reports; (iv) invited IUCN Members to promote the implementation of legal indicators in their national environmental law; and (v) urged governments and secretariats of international and regional organizations to introduce legal indicators in their state-of-the-environment reports.
Similarly, the 2020 “Guidelines on the Role of International Law in Sustainable Natural Resources Management for Development”, adopted by the International Law Association in its Resolution 4/2020, recognized that “the creation of legal indicators for effectiveness of international law related to sustainable development is critical […]. The innovative idea of developing and applying these legal indicators offers the chance to generate a larger system in which assessment of sustainable use of natural resources can be conducted”.
In this connection, Our Common Agenda, the 2021 Report of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, calls for a “global road map for the development and effective implementation of international law” (para. 96), in which the proposed legal indicators could belong naturally.
Domestically, too, some laws explicitly mandate the use of indicators, such the 2014 sustainable development acts of Burkina Faso (Art. 9) and of the Ivory Coast (Art. 6), both of which provide for the creation of specific indicators to monitor progress in attaining sustainable development.
Legal indicators also enrich governance data by highlighting the social function of the law and pinpointing the legal, institutional and cultural obstacles to environmental law enforcement. Their benefits are even greater when considering the significant cost of non-compliance with the laws, which for example was estimated to be around Euro 55 billion per year in the European Union.[3]
Legal indicators have of course their limits and should not be expected to guarantee, alone, full effectivity of the law. While they cannot save the planet, they can surely contribute to improving the outcomes of the law, warning of abuses, identifying obstacles and suggesting solutions, ultimately aiding to ensure progression and avoid regression of environmental law.
The advent of such legal indicators and their progressive acknowledgement, both nationally and globally, reflect an emerging principle of measuring the effectivity of environmental law, which should hopefully be enshrined in the outcome documents of UNEP@50 and Stockholm+50.