On the 4th of December 2025, UCL, as part of its Current Legal Problems Series, hosted a lecture discussing the theme ‘Is Environmental Law Hopeful?’. The chair, Robert Lee, Professor of Law at the University of Birmingham, introduced the speaker, Elen Stokes, providing the audience with some insight into Elen’s work on future uncertainty and its focus on wellbeing for people and the planet. Elen is a Professor in Environmental Law at the University of Bristol, and her lecture reflected on the relationship between environmental law and hope, aiming to uncover the role hope plays in teaching and researching in the field. 

Is hope flawed?  

Elen started the lecture by explaining that, at the start of a new academic year, her undergraduate environmental law students come to the course with great hope, expecting to make a positive change. Here, she places hope as an essential frame for understanding environmental law, and goes on to analyse different approaches to hope. 

She comments on how Judge Eicke, in KlimaSeniorinnen v. Switzerland, where the Swiss Government was found to be in violation of their obligations under the European Convention to provide protection against the effects of climate change, assumed a position of worry that such a decision constitutes a ‘false hope’ that courts can provide an answer towards the fight against climate change. Elen translated such a worry by giving examples of how environmental law can signal a level of ambition that cannot be fulfilled, making reference to Cornell Law School’s Annelise Riles’ doubts that the law can be thought of as hopeful, given its limited capacity to deliver on specific promises of social change. 

Elen goes on to comment that the political mood of the day is not one of hope, but perhaps one of disappointment, citing the Office for Environmental Protection report (Progress in improving the natural environment in England 2024/2025), which found that the UK government is still largely off track in achieving its obligations to significantly improve the natural environment. Elen stated that against facts such as this, hope can feel flawed. 

Different approaches to hope

Elen, however, goes on to argue that the prospect of environmental law without hope seems problematic and analyses the idea of hope under different lenses.  

Firstly, as a personal attribute of those who use the law in pursuit of a desired end, Elen gives the example of the case fought by Sarah Finch, challenging the grant of planning permission to expand oil production in Surrey. The case succeeded in the Supreme Court, and this win can be attributed to the hope of those involved, according to Elen, since the claim took years to resolve and was initially refused by the High Court and the Court of Appeal. 

Another way of looking at the relationship between hope and environmental law is to examine how environmental law creates or shapes the conditions of possibility under hope. According to Elen, an example of such would be the net-zero target amendment to the Climate Change Act 2008. Elen stated that national targets such as this might be described as structurally hopeful. As a result, they can have a powerful signalling effect on enforcement and compliance behaviour, shaping the future differently from the present, opening up new fields in which hope is exercised and experienced by multiple actors, sparking citizen action in legal challenges. 

Thinking from hope

Elen structured her analysis by shifting the emphasis and, lastly, placing hope as a point from which to approach environmental law, encouraging the audience to think from hope, rather than towards it. 

To do so, she goes back to the anecdote of her own experience teaching environmental law, where, at the end of the course, the atmosphere among students feels a bit less hopeful, and the overly ambitious hope seems to have been replaced by a more pragmatic sense of possibility. 

Possibility, however, is what keeps us moving. According to Elen, thinking about environmental law hopefully is in part about finding the spaciousness of possibility with room to act. The hope here is not hope that everything will be alright in the end, but that nothing has ever truly ended. 

She goes on to say that thinking about hope might be seen as a way of avoiding the reality that environmental law is failing to deliver the scale and pace of change needed. However, according to her, that is precisely why hope matters, because the effectiveness of environmental law is called into question. 

She finished the lecture by stating that her students, at the start of the environmental law course, are not accepting the status quo but see hope in what law might do to change it. If, at the end of the course, all hope was lost, there would have been a failure in their learning and in her teaching, because without hope, we have no motivation to keep going. 

My take on the event

As an environmental law enthusiast, this lecture resonated particularly strongly with me. And I believe it is particularly relevant now, as the Doomsday Clock was set closer to catastrophe than ever before, in part due to the continued undermining of efforts by world leaders and organisations to address climate change. Against this, Professor Stokes’s reflections serve as a timely reminder that hope remains essential. If we are to work towards a better future for our planet, there is no time like the present to act and to hold governments and institutions to account. 

Many thanks to Francine Juarez Bulio for this review. She is a member of the Lawbore team and a second year LLB student, originally from Brazil. Here’s what she says about herself:

“I have always been interested in Law and actually started a Law degree back home, but I wasn’t able to complete it before moving to England at the age of 19. I hope to work with human rights law one day. Beyond my studies, I really enjoy reading and trying out new coffee shops around London.”