The 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were developed to ‘transform our world.’ Yet critics argue that the concept of sustainable development serves to maintain an unsustainable status quo, or provide a positive gloss on a terminal conflict between its ‘pillars’: environmental protection, economic growth and social welfare. In this article, we examine this tension with respect to the implementation of SDG 12 in the European Union. SDG 12 calls for responsible consumption and production, which necessitates reconciling, or ‘decoupling’, economic growth and environmental degradation: the core of sustainable development. Initial examination reveals that the largest implementation gap is among high-consuming countries, including those of the EU, the focus of our article, who are failing to account for transboundary impacts of products consumed domestically. This shortcoming, facilitated by the flexibility of the SDG ‘global target, national action’ approach, undermines the achievement of other environmental SDGs relating to biodiversity and climate, among others. Yet, as compared to other EU approaches to addressing transboundary environmental harm from trade in existing Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs), which we examine, the global focus and breadth of SDG 12 offers transformative potential. Ultimately, even if the three pillars of sustainable development are not ‘rebalanced’ toward environmental conservation, they can provide a construct for examining interactions and trade-offs between goals. Simply taking account of transboundary consumption, as SDG 12 indicators call for, would encourage more effective cooperation to help producing countries address environmental problems that result from production for export through impact assessment and enforcement.

Leaving the EU Customs Union will necessitate the UK having an independent trade policy. As part of the process of governing its external trade, the UK must consider how it will integrate its sustainable development objectives into this policy. In this briefing paper, we conceive such objectives broadly, including transparency, political participation and access and consultation, as well as obligations within FTAs to uphold labour standards and environmental protections. Here we consider potential approaches to (1) integrating sustainable development objectives into the negotiating process; and (2) reflecting these objectives through UK trade strategy.

This thesis provides a comprehensive overview of international environmental law as it relates to plants. In doing so, it offers new perspectives on some of the key debates in the law, as well as on humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
The first part of the thesis looks at the philosophical rationales for giving legal protection to plants. Drawing on the literature relating to value, different interpretations of the value of plants are identified, including instrumental, intrinsic and ecological. Each interpretation is then tracked in international conservation law and policy. An almost exclusively anthropocentric picture is revealed, and the implications of this for conservation policy and practice are discussed.
Attention then turns to global and regional approaches to protecting plants. First, the construction and content of key legal agreements are assessed against a range of criteria for effectiveness. Second, an analysis of the design and form of conservation mechanisms is conducted, focussing on the extent to which protected areas reflect the ecological needs of plants and the representativeness of lists of protected and endangered species. In each case the law is found to fall short, and proposals on how to address this are given.
In the third part of the thesis, how the law responds to some of the main threats to plants, namely climate change, international trade and alien/invasive species, is considered. Each impacts on plants in different ways and has been subject to very different legal responses. In each case, however, weaknesses can be identified that undermine the law’s ability to adequately protect plants.
Finally, the extent to which the law supports and frustrates the work of conservation practitioners is examined. As well as offering practical reforms to make the law a better tool for practitioners, consideration is given to wider governance reforms to international environmental law.