Indigenous knowledge (IK) is increasingly recognized as essential for biodiversity conservation, climate resilience, and sustainable resource management, providing proven solutions such as regenerative agriculture, water conservation systems, and community-led carbon sequestration. Despite its relevance, prevailing intellectual property (IP) regimes rooted in Western legal traditions remain poorly aligned with the collective, intergenerational, and evolving nature of Indigenous climate innovations. This chapter examines how existing international IP frameworks, including TRIPS, the Nagoya Protocol, and WIPO mechanisms, inadequately protect IK and enable persistent misappropriation and biopiracy. Drawing on qualitative case studies from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, alongside legal and policy analysis of global climate governance instruments such as the Paris Agreement and the UNFCCC, the chapter identifies several critical findings. Current IP systems emphasize individual ownership, novelty, and time-limited protection, thereby excluding IK systems and weakening benefit-sharing arrangements. As a result, Indigenous climate solutions are frequently commercialized without consent or equitable returns to originating communities. The analysis further demonstrates that alternative governance models, including sui generis protections, recognition of customary law, and community-led documentation initiatives, provide viable mechanisms for safeguarding Indigenous innovations while supporting ethical collaboration. The chapter also finds that digital technologies, particularly blockchain and AI-based knowledge repositories, can enhance Indigenous control over documentation, monitoring, and commercialization of climate innovations. The chapter concludes that meaningful climate action requires urgent IP and policy reforms that embed IK as a foundational pillar of global sustainability and climate governance.
Out of Time proposes a new philosophy of law for an age in which technological, environmental, and political change outpaces the legal institutions designed to govern it. Through the original concept of the "anachronism clause," Northon Salomão de Oliveira argues that every legal system silently depends on assumptions about the world that inevitably become outdated. The central challenge of twenty-first-century jurisprudence, therefore, is not merely to create valid rules, but to develop institutions capable of recognizing and correcting their own obsolescence before legal certainty becomes legal illusion. Drawing on the works of Hans Kelsen, H. L. A. Hart, Ronald Dworkin, Robert Alexy, Lon L. Fuller, John Finnis, and other leading legal philosophers, the book examines how this hidden structural problem emerges across the defining challenges of our century, including artificial intelligence, climate change, democratic legitimacy, biotechnology, international security, economic inequality, resource sustainability, mental health, disinformation, quantum computing, space governance, decentralized finance, longevity, and persuasive technologies. Rather than treating these issues as isolated fields of regulation, Out of Time reveals them as expressions of a single philosophical question: How can law remain legitimate when the world it was designed to govern no longer exists? Blending rigorous legal theory with philosophical reflection and memorable narrative, Out of Time offers an original framework for understanding the relationship between law, time, institutional adaptation, and the future of human civilization. It is a work intended for scholars, jurists, policymakers, and anyone interested in the future of legal thought in an era of accelerating change. Philosophy of Law Jurisprudence Legal Theory Institutional Adaptation Artificial Intelligence and Law Space Law Legal Obsolescence Philosophy of Law, Jurisprudence, Legal Theory, Legal Philosophy, Constitutional Theory, Constitutional Law, Rule of Law, Legal Positivism, Natural Law, Legal Interpretation, Comparative Law, International Law, Public Law, Global Governance, Democratic Legitimacy, Human Rights, Justice Theory, Institutional Design, Institutional Adaptation, Legal Certainty, Legal Innovation, Legal Reform, Legal Obsolescence, Institutional Resilience, Adaptive Governance, Future of Law, Emerging Technologies, Law and Technology, Artificial Intelligence, AI Governance, AI Regulation, Algorithmic Decision-Making, Digital Governance, Digital Rights, Digital Society, Cyber Law, Data Governance, Quantum Computing, Quantum Law, Evidence Law, Space Law, Space Governance, Outer Space Treaty, Extraterrestrial Resources, Climate Change Law, Environmental Law, Sustainability, Intergenerational Justice, Resource Governance, Biotechnology Law, Bioethics, Longevity, Mental Health Law, Disinformation, Information Integrity, Persuasive Technology, Behavioral Regulation, Economic Inequality, Decentralized Finance, Financial Regulation, Regulatory Theory, Institutional Trust, Political Philosophy, Ethics of Technology, Future Studies, Civilization Studies, Legal Systems, Normative Theory, Twenty-First Century Law, Northon Salomão de Oliveira Northon Salomão de Oliveira ORCID: 0009-0007-4038-0609 Biography Northon Salomão de Oliveira is a Brazilian writer and jurist specializing in communication law, whose intellectual career is distinguished by its interdisciplinary approach, integrating Law, Communication Studies, Advertising, Marketing, Philosophy, Anthropology, Psychology, Psychiatry, Organizational Theory, and Literature. His scholarly work explores the dynamic relationship between law, technology, culture, and society, addressing some of the defining challenges of the twenty-first century, including climate change, artificial intelligence and automation, global governance and democracy, biotechnology and human survival, international security, economic inequality, the sustainability of natural resources, mental health, disinformation, and the ethical, philosophical, and legal reconstruction of civilization. His editorial portfolio includes books published in different international markets by distinguished publishers such as the Portuguese-Brazilian Kotter Editorial and the British Camden House, in addition to worldwide digital distribution through platforms including Amazon KDP and Google Play Books. In July 2026, he published The Odyssey (English Edition) and A Odisseia (Brazilian Edition), companion collections featuring a curated selection of sixty works chosen by his readers. Beyond his books, he has authored more than 1,500 articles published in academic repositories, legal platforms, and major media outlets, including SSRN (Elsevier), SciELO, Academia.edu, Zenodo (CERN), Folha de S.Paulo, Administradores, Jus, and Jusbrasil.
Limited financing for decentralised renewable energy (DRE) projects has driven interest in impact labels like Distributed Renewable Energy Certificates (D-RECs). This working paper examines their role in India, exploring market processes, stakeholder perspectives, and how such instruments can support scaling DRE systems.
Abstract This chapter addresses the emergence of energy communities in Colombia as an innovative element for the transition to a decentralized energy model. In a context marked by rising energy prices and an accelerated energy transition, these projects are a bet on sustainable energy practices and the improvement of national energy security. Energy communities also aim to democratize distributed energy sources. They face significant political and practical challenges. Energy communities are citizen-driven energy actions that involve local communities with the purpose of generating, consuming, and managing energy in a collective and decentralized way. The chapter reviews existing literature on the collective generation of energy and its existing experiences. Despite Colombia’s ambitious target to reduce emissions by 51 per cent by 2030, significant gaps in current laws and policies hinder the integration of sustainability into distributed energy resources (DER) programs. Key issues include regulatory barriers, limited access to finance, and the need for better integration with the country’s existing energy infrastructure. To address these challenges, various legal approaches will be analysed, drawing lessons from international experiences and proposing strategies to align incentives with the private sector and restore investor confidence. The focus is on creating an enabling regulatory framework that facilitates the growth of energy communities. Finally, the chapter highlights that energy communities have great potential to transform the Colombian energy sector, but concerted efforts are needed to address regulatory, financial, and infrastructural challenges. By aligning incentives and restoring investor confidence, energy communities can thrive as part of a new decentralized energy model in Colombia.
This study examines how blockchain-based smart contracts can support environmental law enforcement by enhancing transparency, compliance monitoring, and regulatory coordination within legally pluralistic governance systems. despite the rapid expansion of blockchain applications in sustainability governance, existing research has largely examined smart contracts from technical or economic perspectives, with limited attention to their integration within formal environmental legal systems. this study addresses this gap by positioning blockchain-enabled smart contracts as legally embedded compliance-support instruments rather than purely technological solutions. A qualitative comparative case-study approach was employed, combining doctrinal environmental law analysis with examination of blockchain governance frameworks, statutory instruments, judicial rulings, and relevant policy documents. the study contributes novel empirical and conceptual insight by integrating sustainability-index modeling with legal analysis of smart contract–based environmental governance, a dimension insufficiently addressed in prior blockchain scholarship. a combination of stakeholder interviews and quantitative modeling also played key roles in assessing the effectiveness of integrated legal frameworks at reducing conflicts and driving sustainable outcomes. quantitative analysis was conducted using sustainability indices and governance-efficiency metrics derived from blockchain-based assessment models, enabling comparative evaluation of regulatory performance, compliance reliability, and cost-efficiency outcomes across jurisdictions. Findings indicate that regions implementing co-management agreements, along with culturally responsive policies, experienced marked declines in both, legal challenges and environmental harm. the percentage improvements reflect modeled regulatory-performance scenarios derived from comparative sustainability indices rather than experimental intervention outcomes. the sustainability indices were improved by 25-45% with cost-efficiency gains in the range of 18-25%. the findings further demonstrate that smart contracts, when embedded within existing statutory oversight mechanisms, can strengthen environmental enforcement through automated verification, immutable recordkeeping, and standardized sustainability reporting, without displacing judicial authority. stakeholder assessments indicated the highest acceptance levels when blockchain-supported regulatory frameworks aligned automated enforcement mechanisms with existing institutional and community governance structures. references to family and customary legal systems are incorporated only insofar as they affect the institutional implementation of environmental regulation and do not constitute the primary analytical focus of the study. the study emphasizes the necessity of adjusted, integrative legal frameworks that adhere to cultural standards, enhance legal institutions, and include local communities.
This research investigates the barriers to effective climate finance in Bangladesh, a Least Developed Country (LDC) highly vulnerable to climate threats such as sea-level rise, cyclones, salinity intrusion, and flooding. Despite receiving a significant share of international climate funds for LDCs, Bangladesh faces persistent challenges including complex access procedures, reliance on loan-based financing, institutional limitations, and centralized governance. The study examines Bangladesh's legal and institutional frameworks, including the Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan (BCCSAP) and the Climate Change Trust Act 2010, alongside constitutional and judicial environmental commitments. Findings reveal systemic issues such as limited local participation, donor-driven management, and concerns over debt sustainability. Key recommendations include shifting towards grant-based finance, expanding legal standing for environmental litigation, decentralizing fund access to local governments, and enacting a dedicated Climate Change Act. The study underscores the imperative for Bangladesh to embed climate justice within its legal and financial systems and to advocate strongly in international climate forums. This research contributes valuable insights to the global discourse on climate justice and resilience for the most vulnerable nations.
Mohammad Aftab Mahmud, Md.Ridwan Mahmud, Md. Zakir Hossan, Asif Mahmud · 6 authors
Bangladesh is one of the nations highly vulnerable to climate impacts. It lacks a structured and transparent voluntary carbon market to support the country’s sustainability goals. This paper presents a decentralized blockchain platform designed to enable carbon credit issuance, verification, and trading in accordance with Bangladesh’s pledge to reduce carbon emissions. Using Ethereum smart contracts and MetaMask wallet integration, the system ensures secure and transparent transactions. A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) prototype was developed and tested, demonstrating operations including land registration, carbon credit calculation, and peer-to-peer trading of tokenized credits. The platform features a Next.js frontend, Solidity-based smart contracts, and a registry module to ensure traceable credit ownership. The system combats common challenges in traditional carbon markets, including opacity and fraud risk. Functional evaluations showed reliable performance across use cases, with low gas costs and positive user experience during wallet-based interactions. This work provides a solution for climate finance infrastructure in developing nations. It lays the foundation for regulatory integration, decentralized data storage via InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), and future collaboration with global carbon exchanges.
ABSTRACT The Water Reserve Unit (WRU) proposes a new category of securitized, resource-backed reserve assets that integrate verified freshwater reserves into the global financial architecture.Unlike speculative digital assets, WRU represents a regulated and institutionally verified instrument designed to enhance global financial stability through linkage to real, measurable resources. The framework unites economic, legal, and technological dimensions — including distributed-ledger verification, sustainable-development principles, and international governance mechanisms — to enable transparent, compliant, and auditable issuance of water-backed value units.Technological transparency is achieved through distributed-ledger proof-of-reserve mechanisms ensuring real-time verification, accountability, and cross-border interoperability. Legally, the concept builds upon the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 64/292 (2010), which recognizes the human right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation, and aligns with the UN Sustainable Development Goal 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation), embedding this right within a financial-institutional framework. By translating normative principles of international water law — such as those articulated in the 1997 UN Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses — into measurable reserve instruments, WRU operationalizes the linkage between resource security and financial stability. Methodologically, the WRU framework is grounded in institutional economics (Commons, North), ecological macroeconomics, and sustainability finance, integrating valuation of natural capital with modern digital auditability. It provides a conceptual and technological foundation for recognizing water as a reserve-eligible asset, comparable in function to gold or Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), yet intrinsically tied to the planet’s most vital resource. Thus, WRU is not a cryptocurrency or utility token but a sovereignly regulated, resource-anchored financial standard — a new class of sustainability-linked reserve assets that integrate environmental resilience, economic equity, and technological trust within the evolving global financial system.
Jessica Man, Sadiq Jaffer, Patrick Ferris, Martin Kleppmann · 5 authors
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have a significant climate impact, and data centres account for a large proportion of the carbon emissions from ICT. To achieve sustainability goals, it is important that all parties involved in ICT supply chains can track and share accurate carbon emissions data with their customers, investors, and the authorities. However, businesses have strong incentives to make their numbers look good, whilst less so to publish their accounting methods along with all the input data, due to the risk of revealing sensitive information. It would be uneconomical to use a trusted third party to verify the data for every report for each party in the chain. As a result, carbon emissions reporting in supply chains currently relies on unverified data. This paper proposes a methodology that applies cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs for carbon emissions claims that can be subsequently verified without the knowledge of the private input data. The proposed system is based on a zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARK) protocol, which enables verifiable emissions reporting mechanisms across a chain of energy suppliers, cloud data centres, cloud services providers, and customers, without any company needing to disclose commercially sensitive information. This allows customers of cloud services to accurately account for the emissions generated by their activities, improving data quality for their own regulatory reporting. Cloud services providers would also be held accountable for producing accurate carbon emissions data.
Ellen Louise Miland Peytz, Patricia Lindqvist Bernburg
Pollution affects the earth and our future, which is why it is important to focus on how to reduce the excessive emissions we are seeing today. The current approach for addressing the problem does not lead to sufficient reduction in the level of pollution; hence it is highly relevant to look for alternative ways to regulate and guide behaviour. In this paper, a decentralised regulatory principle - the Beneficiary-Compensates Principle (BCP) (Gudmundsson et al. 2024) - is analysed as a supplement to the current pollution regulation. The BCP proposes reward rather than punishment – that is, those who reduce their pollution are compensated for their reduction, instead of the general approach where polluters are penalised. The decentralised aspect is included in the principle’s implementation using blockchain technology and the use of smart contracts to facilitate compensation. In the analysis, we explore the need for perfect knowledge about the benefits, as well as the realism behind the assumption of quasilinear preferences. In addition, we look at the challenges associated with the implementation phase. All this is summarised in the discussion, where we consider, among other things, in which scenarios BCP can be successfully implemented and whether these scenarios are also those where the current handling falls short. The scenarios we discuss are at the local level, where there are either no resources or prioritisation to involve central coordination, as well as at the global level. We conclude that BCP has great potential, but there are some barriers such as lack of self-enforcement and the fact that the principle is still under development and therefore relatively unknown to the general public. There is a need to demonstrate usability and build trust for the principle to really be considered as a viable supplement.
Notwithstanding the general acknowledgment of its importance, there are still uncertainties and ambiguities as to the precise meaning and actual application of the precautionary principle in international environmental law. In the context of decision making at the inter‐State level, it has been explained that one of the interpretations of this principle means a ‘shift’ in the allocation of the burden of proof. Unsurprisingly, a similar effect of the principle can be, and has been, claimed in dispute settlement. Given these claims, the general aim of this article is twofold: first, to define what a ‘shift’ in the allocation of the burden of proof actually means; and second, to explore and assess whether this theoretical/conceptual understanding of the ‘shift’ is applied when the precautionary principle is at stake, and whether there are good reasons to apply it in dispute settlement and decision‐making processes.
Negotiators preparing for Rio+20 are missing an important opportunity. Private sustainability governance (PSG) is thriving: organizations created by business and civil society groups, as well as public—private partnerships, adopt and apply significant regulatory standards and undertake valuable operational activities, including pilot projects and financing. However, even though reforming the institutional framework for sustainable development is a central part of the Rio+20 agenda, negotiators are focusing almost exclusively on inter-governmental organizations such as the UN Environment Program (UNEP), the Commission for Sustainable Development and the Economic and Social Council. This public—private engagement gap isolates international governance from the energy and innovation of PSG, and impedes efforts to coordinate the bifurcated and decentralized system of sustainability governance. This article argues that states, and especially international organizations, should actively support PSG as part of the institutional framework for sustainable development, while steering private and public—private schemes towards good organizational practices and the pursuit of public goals. Engagement with PSG would help international institutions pursue their sustainability missions more effectively, promote the emergence of effective and legitimate private schemes, manage fragmentation, promote experimentation and learning, and enhance citizen participation. The article outlines two fruitful modes of engagement pioneered by UNEP: regulatory cooperation, in which international authorities engage directly with business firms, industry groups and other ‘targets’, influencing them to adopt more sustainable behaviors; and orchestration, in which authorities engage with intermediary organizations, such as multi-stakeholder private governance schemes, catalyzing, supporting and steering them as they seek to influence the ultimate targets of policy.