Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing is a strategy for allocating investment funds on the basis of the extent to which the operations of a company, or a portfolio of companies, affect the environment, advance social justice, or follow good corporate governance practices. It is of intense and increasing interest to millions of investors who seek to minimize financial risks and maximize their financial returns. It also appeals to investors who seek to align their investments with their core personal values.

Corporations have received growing criticism for their role in climate change, perpetuating racial and gender inequality, and other pressing social issues. In response, shareholders are increasingly focusing on environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) criteria in selecting investments, and asset managers are responding by offering a growing number of ESG mutual funds. But are these funds giving investors what they promise? This Article provides a unique picture of the current ESG environment with an eye to informing regulatory policy.

The Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review (ELPAR) is published by the Environmental Law Institute’s (ELI’s) Environmental Law Reporter in partnership with Vanderbilt University Law School. This Comment highlights the results of the ELPAR article selection process and reports on the environmental legal scholarship for the 2021-2022 academic year, including the number of environmental law articles published in general law reviews versus environmental law journals, and the topics covered in the articles.

In 2015, the United Nations Member States, including the United States, unanimously approved 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030. In a forthcoming book, leading legal scholars examine each of the SDGs and recommend a suite of government, private-sector, and civil society actions to help the United States achieve these goals. This Article is adapted from Chapter 12 of that book, Governing for Sustainability (John C. Dernbach & Scott E. Schang eds., ELI Press, forthcoming 2023).

Climate change has captured the attention of governments, regulators, international bodies, and the private sector. But climate change is arguably a single facet of a larger concern: the “rapid decline” in the integrity of nature. Climate and other natural systems are interconnected, and recent literature has focused increasingly on this “interdependence of climate, ecosystems, and biodiversity,” spurring a wide variety of organizations to reflect on the broader role nature plays in environmental sustainability.

Underregulation is a common and persistent environmental law problem, with recent scholarly focus on individual contaminants of emerging concern (CECs), whose harm is not fully known. But little attention has been given to the general trend of underregulation with respect to these chemicals, or explaining why this systematic underregulation occurs. This Article posits that federal agencies have been unacceptably slow to initiate protective regulations, and even once regulations are promulgated, they leave regulatory gaps that continue to expose populations to harmful effects.

The field of environmental law has seen many changes over the years, with demonstrable legal and policy victories for cleaner air and water. While the face of the environmental movement in its beginnings was predominantly male, women have become more prominent and influential within environmental law and policy over the decades.

The U.S. legal cannabis market is an estimated $60 billion industry, with approximately 28,000 businesses operating and employing upwards of 300,000 people, and growing rapidly. Large-scale cultivation requires significant energy usage, nutrient and pesticide inputs, and water usage, resulting in cumulative environmental impacts. Addressing these concerns raises complex legal issues because of cannabis’ federal classification as a Schedule 1 narcotic, which prevents federal agencies from collecting data on, providing guidance to, or regulating the industry.

The circular economy has gone mainstream as a goal in the transitions toward a more sustainable society. Often, however, laws that promote a circular economy remain vague or narrowly focused on resource efficiency, obscuring the fact that they have multiple environmental effects and can lead to environmental trade offs. This Article examines how to properly frame circular economy laws for sustainability, focusing on product-service systems generally and the case of car sharing in particular.

Animal agriculture is one of the leading sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon offset markets allow entities to reduce their overall climate impact by financing projects that decrease emissions elsewhere. This Article analyzes the viability of an offset protocol that credits farms for transitioning from raising livestock to growing crops, based on the difference in emissions between these operations.