COP23: introducing a new toolkit to help support the Paris Agreement

From 6-17 November, representatives from around the world are meeting in Bonn to discuss climate change at the 23rd 'conference of the parties' (COP23) under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Steven Malby introduces a new Law and Climate Change Toolkit developed as a global resource for legal policy makers responsible for climate change policies

Primary care networks: navigating new organisational forms.

National Health Service England (NHSE) instigated Primary Care Networks (PCNs) as a collaboration of general practices working together at scale to improve population health in the local community. The aim of the study was to capture general practitioner PCN leaders' perceptions of the opportunities and pitfalls of PCNs, as well as points of learning, during their inception and development, in order to guide the future development of PCN form and function. The study, carried out in primary care, took a qualitative design. Nine PCN general practitioner leaders were interviewed in depth to gather their views and experiences of PCNs. We also collated 31 free-text survey responses pertaining to how participants perceived the purpose of PCNs. The key themes were - defining purpose and managing ambiguity; bureaucracy vs. local autonomy; relational working; facilitative leadership. The need for purpose setting to remain adaptive was seen as crucial in avoiding the constraints of too rigid a structure in order to retain local ownership, whilst remaining focussed around meeting complex population needs and reducing variation. Participants reported navigating their way through striking a balance between the 'top down' mandate and recognising local need. Of importance to the success of PCNs was the necessity of effective relational working and facilitative leadership CONCLUSION: Whilst the desire to be proactive and collaborative was emphasised by the PCN leaders, the importance of distributed leadership and time given to building trust and effective working relationships within new organisational forms cannot be underestimated. [Abstract copyright: Copyright © 2021, The Authors.

AIR POLLUTION IMPACTS AND SOURCES UNDER A CHANGING CLIMATE: A CASE STUDY FOR SCUNTHORPE, UK

Climate change may affect local air quality by altering the emission, dispersion, chemical transformation and deposition of air pollutants. This study evaluates the effects of climate change in a real-life mixed land-use situation where there are adjacent urban and industrial activities and also fugitive emissions from stockpiles and unpaved roads. For this example we show how windspeed and time-of-day dependent ‘bi-polar plots’ created from ambient monitoring data can be used to learn more about the nature of sources responsible for exceedances of particulate matter air quality standards, and hence to assess how sensitive their impacts are to climate change. Unpaved roads and wind-blown fugitive sources such as stockpiles and coal handling beds in the industrial area appear to contribute substantially to raised air-quality impacts. The effect of climate change on impacts from these sources may differ from its effect on impacts from conventional combustion sources

Beyond sword and shield: the UN human rights system and criminal law

Growth in the scope and mandate of the United Nations human rights system sees it increasingly wrestle with questions of national criminal law. The UN human rights system today forms part of a wider transnational socio-legal process that shapes decisions on whether to criminalise conduct or not. Issues such as sexual orientation, defamation, hate speech, and homelessness have emerged as key human rights (de)criminalisation debates. The notion of the human rights sword and shield continues to describe the activation or restraint of the criminal law, but human rights is not always able to provide simple criminalisation conclusions and its exact application to the criminal law often remains contested. Meeting future criminalisation challenges will likely require a more nuanced approach, such as human rights guidelines for the criminal law, informed by frameworks and inspiration from fields including criminal theory

Public Wrongs and Human Rights: An Orderly Approach?

Criminal law is a system for societal ordering, as much as it is for protection against interpersonal harm and wrongs. Whilst such laws can engage rights to privacy and freedoms of expression and movement, international human rights rarely feature in criminal theory. Using Duff’s public wrongs theory, a normative argument is made for recognition of international human rights within the national civil order, as well as through a proposed supra-national human rights polity. This is tested through identification of human rights criminalization principles from public ordering cases in the European Court of Human Rights. International human rights offers a formal route to recognition of liberal principles, as well as adding possible new boundary conditions within criminal theory