Environmental Law

Terrestrial Mining historically answered global demand for minerals and metals. But, as Earth’s once-plentiful mines diminish, companies and states seek new avenues to meet the world’s ever-increasing resource demand. Instead of down, scientists are now looking up at the stars, to Space Mining, which entails resource extraction from celestial bodies. It is not yet economically feasible, but strides are slowly being made in turning this futuristic industry into a reality. Currently, Space Mining has limited regulation, creating the potential for conflict over space’s valuable resources. Therefore, the international community should begin preparing for the industry’s eventual rise by creating a regulatory and dispute resolution framework. This comment will advocate for incorporating the regulatory and dispute resolution regimes of Deep-Sea Mining in the space context. The two main modes are (1) an industrial regulator akin to the “International Seabed Authority” and (2) an International Arbitration Panel dedicated to handling Space Mining disputes like the “Seabed Disputes Chamber.” These frameworks can properly monitor potential externalities while still providing incentives to encourage discovery.

Thousands of international investment and trade agreements contain provisions protecting investments made by parties from the signatory states. One such provision is Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), a mechanism allowing foreign investors to sue host states in arbitration for treaty violations. Fossil fuel investors are increasingly utilizing ISDS successfully to hold states liable for climate action; arbitral tribunals are awarding large compensations to these investors when states deny them permits for upstream activities or enact phase-out policies attempting to ban fossil fuel consumption. These awards impose heavy burdens on states while simultaneously deterring climate action by creating fears of liability. This Comment proposes that states could invoke the security exception, a common clause in these international agreements that allows a state to violate its treaty obligations to protect its essential security interests, to defend action targeting fossil fuel assets for the purpose of mitigating climate change. Historically, tribunals have accepted a broad slate of interests, from economic to environmental, as within the purview of the security exception, and they have afforded wide discretion to invoking states in defining their security interests for themselves. Climate change poses a significant security threat to the socioeconomic and political stability of countries. Invoking the security exception to defend climate action would be a novel and potentially effective defense that could help states win such disputes, advancing global efforts to achieve the Paris Agreement climate goals.

This Article explores the rise of a new model of global governance: the “click-and-commit world order,” characterized by digitally mediated pledging platforms through which a wide array of actors—states, corporations, cities, NGOs, and individuals—publicly commit to addressing global problems through non-binding promises. In contrast to traditional treaty-making, these pledging platforms offer a decentralized, voluntary framework for international cooperation that relies on public declarations rather than negotiated obligations.

Within the U.N. system, this mode of governance developed within the United Nations Global Compact and the Paris Climate Agreement, where bottom-up pledges were institutionalized within formal and informal international structures. The internet now amplifies and democratizes this model, enabling coordination and norm diffusion without requiring state action or legal enforcement. Examples such as the Net Zero Space Initiative and a range of climate-related platforms illustrate how the pledging order bypasses formal treaty regimes in favor of reputational incentives, public transparency, and symbolic participation.

The Article evaluates the values, risks, and institutional dynamics of this emergent order, including its emphasis on pluralism, voluntarism, and functional over status-based participation. Ultimately, the pledging order reflects a shift from constitutional, rule-restraining global law toward a voluntarist, productivity-oriented attempt to address 21st-century transnational challenges—particularly where formal multilateralism has stalled.

Experts predict that millions of people will need to migrate internally and across borders due to global warming. Currently, international legal frameworks do not extend the same legal protections to climate migrants as are afforded refugees and asylum seekers. While international law recognizes the right to asylum based on political persecution, there is no international right to migrate based on climate-based harms that states are legally bound to observe. This Comment proposes a climate migration lottery (CML) that would be administered internationally to address current and future climate-based migration. Under this proposal, receiving states would agree via a treaty to admit their fair share of the total pool of climate migrants selected through the lottery. Migrants from countries with a high susceptibility to having large portions of territory rendered uninhabitable by climate change would be eligible to enter the CML. This comment argues that a CML can alleviate the strain on regions in developing states that must accommodate internally displaced persons as well as the burden on countries that are near low-lying Pacific island states that will experience significant rates of displacement due to sea level rises.

I. Introduction