Environmental and Energy Law, edited by Karen E. Makuch and Ricardo Pereira, published by Wiley‐Blackwell, 2012, 651 pp., £80.95, hardback.

Date01 April 2016
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/reel.12157
AuthorMontserrat Abad Castelos
Published date01 April 2016
in the eyes of the broader interna-
tional community.
VanderZwaag similarly considers
the role of the Arctic Council and
the future of Arctic Ocean gover-
nance. He observes that the Arctic
Council continues to evolve exibly
and incrementally on many fronts,
and identies three key challenges
for governing the Arctic: to address
governance of the Central Arctic
Ocean beyond national jurisdiction;
putting the ecosystem approach
into practice; and continue rming
upthe Arctic Council by means of
securing stable nancing and
strengthening the Arctic voicein
international fora.
The volume offers several impor-
tant lessons. The contributing
authors are nearly unanimous in
their analysis of the current regimes
for polar oceans governance and
submit that the regimes work in a
satisfactory manner for the time
being, and no imminent crisis is
lurking in the near future. The cur-
rent exploitation of resources in
both regions is relatively well gov-
erned and, notwithstanding the
existence of a number of territorial
disputes, they do not generally
impede cooperation and the joint
development of resources and
joint preservative measures. A
common challenge for polar oceans
governance seems to be the time-
consuming processes of moving
forward and adapting to new cir-
cumstances. For the Arctic, this has
become particularly visible in terms
of the Polar Code, and for the
Antarctic, the ATS general approach
towards environmental changes is a
particular soft spot.
Polar Oceans Governance in an
Era of Environmental Change pro-
vides a successful and skilfully edi-
ted collaboration of articles written
by outstanding researchers. The
dualistic perspective is a clever tool
for the purpose of highlighting the
differences and similarities between
the polar oceans, the existing man-
agement regimes and their ability to
respond and adapt to the new
challenges resulting from environ-
mental change.
The book will have broad appeal to
policy makers, legal professionals
and scholars with an interest in inter-
national law and policy. Due to its
carefully crafted structure, it may
easily be recommended to those
unfamiliar with polar law as it offers
a general and easy-to-follow intro-
duction to polar oceans governance,
environmental challenges and
geostrategic dynamics distinguishing
the Polar Regions, before going into
the more theoretical discussions.
Reading the entire volume is rec-
ommended for achieving a com-
plete overview of the challenges of
polar oceans governance, and for
making full use of the books bipolar
perspectives. That said, if one were
to read only sections of the book, a
few chapters stand out. Particularly
worth mentioning is the one written
by Doelle, delivering a passionate
and highly interesting contribution
to the debate on Arctic climate gov-
ernance. Another chapter of partic-
ular interest is Learys observation
on the scramble for Antarctic and
Arctic resources, where he very
accurately calls attention to marine
bioprospecting as an increasingly
important industry in the polar
oceans.
Signe Veierud Busch
University of Tromsø
Environmental and Energy
Law, edited by Karen E.
Makuch and Ricardo Pereira,
published by Wiley-Blackwell,
2012, 651 pp., £80.95,
hardback.
Environmental and energy law are
prime examples of legal areas
whose application involves experts
who are not themselves lawyers,
and who therefore require appro-
priate legal training, which unfortu-
nately they may not always be able
to obtain. It is clear that experts
involved in the implementation and
development of the law need to
have a thorough understanding of
the main aspects of the legal issues
in question, both domestic and
international, and, where the Euro-
pean Union (EU) is concerned, of
this legal system as well. In this
regard, Environmental and Energy
Law, edited by Karen Makuch and
Ricardo Pereira, is aimed not only
at legal specialists, but also at tech-
nical experts such as engineers, chem-
ists, geologists or environmental
scientists, whose everyday work
takes place in scenarios to which
the legal frameworks analysed in
great detail in this book apply. This
is important, since scientists and
experts working in a variety of elds
unrelated to the law nonetheless
have an inuence on the creation
and development of international
environmental and energy law.
Science plays a central role in the
development of environmental and
energy policies and law. For
instance, how else can acceptable
parameters for atmospheric pollu-
tion or the use of agricultural pesti-
cides be dened? How else can we
determine specic climate change
mitigation targets? These are just
some of the examples mentioned by
the editors, but they clearly illus-
trate the closeness of the relation-
ship between science, law and
policy making in this eld.
The book is divided into nine parts,
opening with an Introductionout-
lining the core elements of interna-
tional, European and United
Kingdom (UK) environmental law,
which constitute the three focal
areas explored in the book. Part
Two deals with Innovation, Sus-
tainability and the Law, and con-
tains four chapters. In Chapter 2,
Panos Merkouris analyses the prin-
ciple of sustainable development in
the context of best available tech-
niques (BAT), examining its content
and the controversy surrounding its
scope. Whilst acknowledging that
the principle may still not have
moved beyond the status of soft
law, he concludes that this does not
subtract from its normative effect.
ª2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
132
BOOK REVIEWS RECIEL 25 (1) 2016
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