Jurisdiction(s):
European Union

Key definition

Climate Change definition

What does Climate Change mean? In legal practice, climate change describes long-term shifts in the Earth’s climate that inform environmental regulation, planning and EIA, governance and disclosure (ESG/TCFD), finance and litigation. Across the UK and Ireland it is generally a descriptive term rather than one exhaustively defined in statute or case law; climate legislation (for example, the Climate Change Act 2008 and analogous Acts in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland) addresses related concepts such as greenhouse gas emissions, mitigation, adaptation and net zero targets, and instruments adopt their own definitions (for example, the UNFCCC’s focus on anthropogenic change). The term refers to identifiable, persistent changes (typically...

EU Climate Change Law and Policy: from UNFCCC, Kyoto and Paris to ECCP I–II, 2020/2030 Packages, European Green Deal, Fit for 55, Adaptation Strategy and Clean Industrial Deal

Published by a LexisNexis EU Law expert

Practice notes

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Context

Human Activity is increasingly altering the climate and lifting global temperatures by burning fossil fuels, clearing rainforests and rearing livestock. These actions add large amounts of greenhouse gases to those naturally in the air, strengthening the greenhouse effect and causing global warming.

Some atmospheric gases behave like a greenhouse’s glass, trapping the sun’s heat and preventing it from escaping into space. Many are natural, yet human actions are raising the concentrations of several, notably:

carbon dioxide (CO2)
methane
nitrous oxide
fluorinated gases

CO2 is the greenhouse gas most commonly produced by people and is responsible for most man-made warming. Other greenhouse gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, are released in smaller quantities, but they trap heat far more effectively than CO2.

Rising emissions are driven by:

burning fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas), which releases CO2 and nitrous oxide
cutting down forests, as trees help regulate the climate by absorbing CO2 from the air. When they are cut down, that beneficial...

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Laura Bolado

Laura worked in EU law for over two decades making it one her main area of expertise. In 2002 she worked for the European Commission (Brussels) and relocated to London in 2003 to work for the European Medicines Agency. There she gained first-hand experience on the functioning of the EU which she later applied in legal roles at pharmaceutical companies and law firms before turning to a more generalist approach to EU law at LexisNexis. At LexisNexis she helped develop and maintain EU Tracker (writing on the implementation of EU Directives in different EU jurisdictions, etc.) and assisted various departments with EU law matters in her EU Law Specialist capacity. Laura also delivered EU law training to several interns and legal professionals. Laura left LexisNexis in late 2013 to explore her options in different environments. In 2014 Laura lectured EU law at...

Web page updated on 21/05/2026

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