In last years, environmental law has turned significant attention to environmental problems, previously not regulated by law at all. Legal acts have been prepared for mitigation of climate change, reducing energy consumption, avoiding and compensating environmental damage, protection of marine areas. However, this legal regulation is still in the beginning phase and the question is, to what extent such large-scale and multifaceted problems can be solved by legal means at all.
Estonian Environmental Law Center (EELC) organised a series of evening lectures in May and June 2011, named„Legal means for solving environmental problems“. Altogether four evenings of lectures were hold on different topics: marine protection, environmental liability, climate change and energetics.
At the evening lectures, experts from relevant environmental fields introduced background and meaning of the environmental problems; lawyers of EELC in turn provided an overview about what kind og legal means have been used so far, in order to solve these problems, and what are the future plans on global, EU or country level. Lectures ended with discussions were we tried to find out how wide the possibilities of environmental law to solve environmental problems are and where room for improvement could still be found.
The target groups were members of environmental organisations, students and pupils, and all people interested in environmental issues.
In addition to the lectures, four articles on the legal regulation of the issues elaborated at the lectures were published on a popular web site promoting eco-friendly lifestyle - bioneer.ee.
The project was funded by Environmental Investment Centre (http://www.kik.ee)
