Environmental justice is a field of social activism and legal and interdisciplinary research that originates from the United States. It mainly focuses on inequities between human actors in the distribution of environmental benefits and harms and meaningful involvement in environmental governance.

Elias Van Gool (KU Leuven and Université de Lille) discussed how current EU environmental law is largely indifferent to environmental justice, which can, in some cases, result in rules that actually increase existing environmental inequalities. Given that there is evidence of significant environmental inequality in Europe and given how this may exacerbate in coming decades if left unchecked, he argued that it is necessary to better integrate a goal of environmental justice in EU law, for which he offered a few options. This, first of all, is a call to the European environmental law scholarship, which is now increasingly focused on either equity among human actors at the intergenerational and planetary levels or more ‘ecocentrism’. Hence, the ‘anthropocentric’ perspective of environmental justice at the intragenerational and local level may provide a welcome theoretical complement.

The presentation was followed by a lively debate on the extent to which the concept of environmental justice can be transposed to the European context.