We advocate for strong material environmental law that respects planetary boundaries and highlight the structural deficiencies of existing environmental laws.
Strong environmental law ensures a good and just future for all. GLI enables civil society to understand the law and use it for the common good.
Our ongoing projects focus on strengthening environmental law in various areas:
The anthropogenic climate crisis poses an existential threat to us all. Science tells us that even an average global temperature increase of 1.5° Celsius has serious consequences for our climate system, which are already being felt around the world. Even at this temperature limit, however, the most vulnerable groups and states are exposed to considerable risks from floods, droughts, and storms. To tackle the problem, therefore, a clear, holistic approach with ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction targets is needed not only internationally, but also at national level. These must be compatible with the 1.5° target of the Paris Agreement.
We therefore focus our efforts on climate action governance (= regulatory system), as this is where the greatest impact can be achieved. At the national and European level, we monitor whether the German government is fulfilling its obligations under the overarching and guiding climate laws. At the national level, the Climate Protection Act (KSG) is the framework law for climate action. At the European level, it is the European Climate Law (as well as several other laws for different sectors, such as the European Climate Action Regulation, also known as the Effort Sharing Regulation (ESR), and the Emissions Trading Directive. We defend these climate laws against watering down and at the same time try to improve them so that they are in line with the 1.5° target of the Paris Agreement. To this end, we prepare legal arguments and summaries, which we make available to other environmental and climate NGOs. In doing so, we also derive arguments from the current outcomes of major climate lawsuits worldwide: international legal opinions, decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, constitutional complaints in Germany.
Furthermore, we support NGOs in Germany in advocating for the ambitious implementation and preservation of the European Green Deal – the European Union’s central, holistic program of legislation and action. In representing the interests of climate protection, we provide NGOs with legal arguments for effective, socially just, and adequately funded climate action.
In the project “Comprehensible Law: Legal Education for Environmentally-minded Civil Society,” we provide information on various aspects of environmental law. The aim is to promote the enforcement of democratically adopted environmental law. We want to strengthen the capacities of environmentally-minded civil society to work effectively towards the implementation of existing environmental law. Part of this project includes free environmental law consultations and the provision of information material on topics such as climate law, greenwashing, and criminal law relating to the environment.
Since redirecting investments toward environmentally and climate-friendly industries is the key lever for the success of the Green New Deal, we also focus on corporate law related to the environment. This includes, for example, CSRD, CSDDD, EU taxonomy, SFDR, the Deforestation Regulation, and the Empowering Consumers Directive. We advocate for strong environment-related corporate law and strengthen its enforcement through capacity building.
We are currently critically monitoring legal developments at the EU level with regard to the Omnibus and coordinating with other NGOs to counteract the planned deregulation. In the future, we will offer training events on environment-related corporate law and publish briefings.
There are no current English language publications, for a full list of our publications please visit Publikationen.