For two days in mid-November 2025, the long-running conversation on earth system law gathered distinctive momentum. The field has developed significantly through years of collaboration and literature, yet convening its many strands in the same rooms made its core questions resonate more sharply and brought emerging possibilities into clearer view.
The First International Symposium on Earth System Law, held at Wageningen University and Research and followed by an Author Workshop at Utrecht University, brought together more than fifty scholars and practitioners from around the world. The gathering offered a timely opportunity to reflect on the conceptual, methodological, and institutional developments shaping the field, while also considering the pressures that contemporary Earth-system dynamics now place on legal scholarship and governance. Over two days of thought-provoking dialogue, it became clear that earth system law is entering a more practice-attentive and analytically grounded phase.
During the first day in Wageningen, the symposium opened with reflections on the evolution of earth system law as both an emerging field and a long-standing task force within the Earth System Governance community by Frank Biermann, Louis Kotzé, Mike Angstadt, and Rakhyun Kim. J.B. Ruhl’s keynote on Designing Earth System Law as a Complex Adaptive System provided a clear intellectual anchor for the day: if law is to engage meaningfully with the dynamics of the Earth system, it must take complexity, interdependence, and non-linearity as basic premises rather than conceptual challenges to be managed. This framing created a productive point of departure for the parallel panel sessions that followed, in which participants examined how innovative legal thinking might be operationalized within diverse institutional and political contexts.
The programme featured thirty-eight presentations that demonstrated the considerable breadth of contemporary scholarship on earth system law. Participants examined questions of accountability and justice under rapidly changing socio-ecological conditions; the implications of legal pluralism for governing interdependence; the growing relevance of multispecies and rights-based approaches; and the governance implications of artificial intelligence and digital infrastructures. Others interrogated property regimes, resource governance arrangements, and coordination across fragmented institutional landscapes. Several contributions highlighted the role of courts and tribunals as key actors shaping governance across systems, while others introduced methodological approaches linking legal analysis more directly to Earth-system science. Despite their diversity, many participants converged on a shared insight: conventional legal categories struggle to match the pace and scale of contemporary environmental transformations.
In Utrecht, the following day, the Author Workshop shifted the mode of engagement from exploration to synthesis. Guided by the workshop’s framing of the current polycrisis context as one characterized by reconfiguration, complexity, acceleration, and expansion, participants considered how earth system law might develop a more explicit path-to-practice agenda. Through successive rounds of world café discussions and a concluding plenary, participants explored how theoretical commitments could translate into workable methodologies, governance approaches, and institutional designs. Across these conversations, there was a consistent emphasis on the value of interdisciplinary collaboration, the importance of drawing on diverse epistemic traditions including Indigenous and socio-ecological knowledge, and the need for legal methods capable of responding to the scientific and political realities of a rapidly transforming Earth system.
Across both days, the symposium and workshop revealed a field articulating its next phase with growing clarity. The substantive depth of the presentations and the openness of exchange across disciplinary and geographical perspectives created a strong sense of collective movement. The discussions did not aim to produce a singular vision for earth system law, nor would that have been appropriate. Instead, they demonstrated a shared readiness to test existing commitments against the institutional, scientific, and political conditions that structure law in practice.
As work now begins on synthesizing the outcomes of the workshop into a jointly authored paper, the conversations that unfolded over the two days provide a substantive foundation for advancing the next stage of research on earth system law. I remain deeply grateful to the participants and our organizing team for their engagement and the intellectual depth they brought to this evolving field.
Written by: Işık Girgiç, coordinator of the Task Force on Earth System Law
Photo courtesy of Wageningen University and Research Law Group
