Research project Can laws save the natural world?

Our project proposes to combine law and conservation to help develop solutions to the biodiversity crisis. Most of the world’s nations have enacted environmental legal instruments to avert species extinction.

However, these legal instruments do not appear to be able to stop that crisis. Countries are constantly failing to meet agreed targets to reduce the loss of biodiversity. This failure raises the question of whether existing legal instruments, theories and methods are fit for the purpose of protecting species, populations and ecosystems and whether and how their effectiveness can be improved. The purpose of this project is therefore to develop a new interdisciplinary field of scholarship called “legal conservation”. We will develop a theoretical and applied understanding of the interplay between legal and ecological systems and document, analyze, model and improve our understanding of how law and conservation affect each other, with the goal of improving the ability of the law to conserve species. First, we will study how law uses ecological knowledge and how ecological systems respond to legal protection, before exploring whether recent and proposed legal developments show potential to address the biodiversity crisis and finally assessing trends in species protection laws in the EU through a legal observatory. We expect that this deeper integration of law and conservation will open new possibilities to more effectively address the biodiversity crisis.