China's Ecological and Environmental Code, adopted on 12 March 2026, declares 'prevention-first' as a fundamental legal principle. How this principle will be enforced, however, is less obvious. Article 1081 requires environmental public-interest litigation (EPIL) plaintiffs to satisfy the 'ecological damage' conditions, which involve quantifying restoration costs at the outset-a condition that is better satisfied in instances where ecological loss is established than where there is a serious risk of the same. Article 1079 provides for prohibitory-order preservation, but that route is an interim measure. This analysis argues that, unless the Supreme People's Court (SPC) clarifies the interaction among Articles 147, 1079 and 1081, lower courts are likely to read the Code restrictively. Preventive EPIL will formally remain in place, but its impact will be limited.
China's national carbon emissions trading scheme (NCETS) faces persistent challenges in generating a price signal capable of mobilizing large-scale decarbonization investment. Existing scholarship's emphasis on technical rule design has limited its ability to explain this underperformance, leading scholars to conflate early-stage capacity constraints with structural limitations and to overlook interactions among central government agencies. This article situates the NCETS within China's environmental governance framework and examines the institutions that shape decision-making, the structure of their interactions, and how this governance configuration weakens the NCETS's capacity to generate incentives for low-carbon investment. It argues that fragmented authoritarianism has displaced both environmental authoritarianism and environmental federalism in Chinese emissions trading regulation and practice. The opaque, stakeholder-driven decision-making process embedded in the legal framework, together with asymmetries in bargaining power and divergent departmental interests, deprioritizes allowance scarcity and regulatory stability, thereby reducing investment incentives under the NCETS.
Corporate climate litigation has expanded rapidly in recent years, yet scholarly attention has focused primarily on a small number of high-profile cases. This article provides a systematic account of corporate climate litigation outside the USA. Drawing on the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law's Climate Litigation Database, it identifies and analyses 207 judicial cases across 31 jurisdictions in which corporations are named as defendants. The article develops a typology of corporate climate litigation organized according to the substantive focus of the claim and the type of corporate conduct challenged. By mapping this diverse body of jurisprudence, the article highlights emerging legal strategies, patterns across jurisdictions, and the growing range of actors and legal frameworks involved. The analysis demonstrates that corporate climate litigation extends well beyond a small set of landmark cases and increasingly spans multiple areas of law. The article concludes by reflecting on the conceptual boundaries of corporate climate litigation, the transferability of legal strategies across jurisdictions, and the challenges involved in assessing the broader impact of this evolving field.
