‘Water Law as Environmental Law’ Special Issue of the Chinese Journal of Environmental Law : Call for papers

This special issue of the Chinese Journal of Environmental Law aims to deal with water law as part of the broad area of environmental law. It seeks to bring together a collection of articles that look at different aspects of this ‘green’ and ‘blue’ approach to international, transnational, regional and domestic water law. Issues traditionally regulated by water law, such as water allocation, all have environmental implications. Environmental problems that water law seeks to address include water pollution, waste of water, water scarcity and drought, damage to aquatic biodiversity and freshwater ecosystems, coastal ecosystems, and flood-risk management. All these problems are transboundary, i.e., they do not respect national borders. The special issue thus seeks to bring together theoretical, doctrinal, empirical and practical analyses addressing international, transnational, regional, transboundary and domestic environmental problems with a particular focus on water and the issue areas and fields of law relating to freshwater resources. It intends to contribute to identifying legal approaches to negotiating and implementing effective governance strategies for shared water resources and the actors and sectors that depend on them.

The proposed topics are:

• water law in the context of global climate change;
• water law and its role in climate litigation;
• water law and biodiversity;
• water law and the protection and management of shared wetlands;
• water law and marine environmental protection (land and river sources-to-sea);
• water law and the sustainable development goals (SDGs);
• regional water law, involving selected countries, for example, in Southeast Asia, North-Eastern Asia, South Asia, West Asia, Europe and the African continent;
• water law and global solidarity (hydro-solidarity, ‘a community of shared future’);
• water law and the rights-of-rivers approach;
• sustainable human right to water.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is 31 July, 2021. Abstract proposals are to be sent, before this date, to Otto Spijkers at ottospijkers@whu.edu.cn. Otto Spijkers is Professor at the China Institute of Boundary and Ocean Studies (CIBOS) and Research Institute of Environmental Law of Wuhan University, China, as well as founding staff member of its International Law Academy. He is Managing Editor of the Chinese Journal of Environmental Law (https://brill.com/view/journals/cjel/cjel-overview.xml).