The age of the Anthropocene is increasingly infiltrating environmental law and governance discourse providing a new perspective for environmental lawyers, practitioners, academics and actors in government to reconsider the conceptual foundations of law and to re-evaluate the composition and effectiveness of existing institutional governance structures and mechanisms in mediating the human-environment interface during a period of a global socio-ecological crisis.

Accordingly, the work in this research area engages with a range of topics which traditionally form the backbone of environmental law and governance in a manner that illustrates their inadequacies to manage to manage the systemic environmental and societal risks that the Anthropocene entails. This research aims to develop reflexive and responsive legal frameworks and governance structures fit for responding to the local and transboundary social, economic and environmental consequences of earth system changes in the Anthropocene.

We are particularly interested in the following:

• State sovereignty and transboundary or global environmental governance
• Legal personhood and rights of nature
• The role of justice and ethics in environmental law
• Constitutional law and the scope of its environmental protections
• Environmental rule of law
• Environmental democracy
• Earth jurisprudence