PurposeThis paper aims to examine how Sweden, as a member state of the European Union (EU), has implemented the EU Directive on Public Access to Environmental Information (AEI directive) in the context of the principles of good administration.Design/methodology/approachThis paper adopts the EU law methodology, as this paper mainly examines the implementation of the EU AEI directive by the member states and, as an EU member state, how Sweden used procedural autonomy to implement the EU directive at the national level. The EU law methodology further guides how national laws are to be interpreted considering obligations under the EU law. This paper further applies a comparative review to determine the differences in the approaches used by the AEI directive and relevant Swedish national laws to facilitate access to environmental information.FindingsDespite Sweden used a minimalist approach rather than maximal harmonization while implementing the AEI directive at the national level, the Swedish model of the accessibility and availability of environmental information is fully compliant with the principles of good administration. The Swedish approach has an enormous effect on promoting access to environmental information as an integral part of good governance and fundamental rights.Research limitations/implicationsIt was not possible to perform a comparative review of court cases on relevant issues from different EU member states.Practical implicationsAccess to environmental information could be a tool for environmental democracy and sustainable development.Social implicationsAccess to environmental information could contribute to more public engagement and participation in environmental decision making and hence could make developmental projects more inclusive to meet societal objectives.Originality/valueThis study makes a unique contribution by evaluating access to environmental information in the context of the principles of good administration under EU law.

A Short Description of the Contribution

The European Green Deal (EGD) presents a comprehensive strategy to address climate and environmental challenges through a “whole economy” approach. Under this framework, the European Commission has proposed over 168 cross-sectoral strategies and initiatives aimed at transforming the EU into a climate-neutral economy by 2050 and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

As a key component of the EGD, the 2021 EU Climate Adaptation Strategy promotes “smarter, faster, and more systemic” adaptation across member states. Complementing this, the 2021 European Climate Law—particularly Article 5 —emphasizes the need for meaningful progress in climate adaptation through structured reporting mechanisms.

However, the increasing frequency and severity of climate-related events—such as forest fires, heatwaves, floods, and droughts—have led to economic losses exceeding €162 billion between 2021 and 2023. These developments underscore the urgent need to evaluate whether current adaptation strategies in member states are effectively delivering the promised “smarter, faster, and systematic” responses to climate risks.

Despite the reporting requirements, adaptation data from member states remains largely descriptive and lacks quantifiable indicators, making it difficult to assess progress systematically. Furthermore, policy incoherence and institutional limitations in several member states have hindered effective implementation, raising concerns about the adequacy of support from the European Commission and the administrative burden on smaller states.

Sweden, for example, has taken notable steps, including the adoption of a comprehensive Climate Policy Framework in 2017, the 2018 Ordinance on climate adaptation (2018:1428), and a revised strategy in 2024. These measures require 32 national authorities and 21 county administrative boards to develop climate adaptation action plans. Nevertheless, critiques persist regarding insufficient policy coherence, limited institutional collaboration, and the absence of robust assessment mechanisms.

This presentation uses Sweden as a case study to identify potential shortcomings in the implementation of the EU Climate Adaptation Strategy and proposes ways to enhance the effectiveness of Swedish adaptation efforts. The goal is to contribute to the broader success of the EGD and the SDGs.

Key Questions Addressed:

1. Has the European Green Deal systematically integrated climate adaptation into its framework?

2. What measures has Sweden taken to align with the EU Climate Adaptation Strategy and the climate targets of SDG 13?

3. Are Swedish climate adaptation strategies delivering the “smarter, faster, and systematic” outcomes envisioned by the EU Climate Adaptation Strategy and European Climate Law?

The fashion industry in the European Union (EU) exerts a significant environmental impact, particularly through excessive resource consumption, overproduction, and overconsumption. These practices contribute to climate change via massive textile waste, biodiversity loss, and widespread land and water pollution. In response, there is an urgent need for the EU to implement robust legal measures to transition the fashion sector toward sustainability and circularity.

A circular business model for the fashion industry addresses the entire lifecycle of textiles, aiming to transform production and consumption patterns. This model envisions textile products that are durable, repairable, and recyclable. It also calls for legal frameworks that support the development of profitable reuse and repair services, ensure their accessibility, and assign extended responsibility to producers across the supply chain.

However, a critical gap remains in the availability of effective legal tools to incentivize businesses to adopt circular and sustainable strategies. While the European Commission has introduced several initiatives—such as the Eco-design Regulation, the revised Waste Framework Directive, the Repair Directive, and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive—these measures primarily focus on design, waste management, sustainability reporting, and enabling resale, repair, and recycling.

This presentation reviews both existing and proposed EU-level legal mechanisms aimed at promoting a circular fashion economy. It also proposes a comprehensive legal toolbox to "close the loop" and facilitate the transformation of the EU fashion industry. The analysis is framed within the broader context of achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure), SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), and SDG 13 (Climate Action).

Aim:Sweden consistently ranks highly in global sustainability and climate change indices. This presentation aims to critically examine the country’s legal and institutional frameworks to understand the strengths and weaknesses of its strategies in achieving the targets under Goal 13 of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). By analyzing Sweden’s approach, the study seeks to uncover key factors contributing to its performance in environmental sustainability and climate action.

Main Arguments:Achieving the targets of SDG 13 requires robust national efforts in climate mitigation and adaptation. This analysis explores how Sweden integrates climate change into national policies and planning (Target 13.2), enhances education and institutional capacity (Target 13.3), and contributes to global resilience and adaptive capacity (Target 13.1). It also examines Sweden’s role in operationalizing the Green Climate Fund (Target 13.a) and supporting vulnerable countries (Target 13.b). The study provides insights into the alignment of Swedish legal instruments and institutional mechanisms with these global objectives.

Conclusion:Sweden has adopted a comprehensive Climate Policy Framework, including a Climate Act, defined climate goals, a Climate Policy Council, and a national adaptation strategy supported by green investments. However, assessing actual progress remains challenging due to the lack of measurable indicators specific to SDG 13. To enhance effectiveness, Sweden should prioritize climate adaptation, strengthen local capacity-building efforts, and establish clearer links between SDG 13 and other relevant goals to facilitate more accurate progress tracking.

The traditional approach to teaching intellectual property (IP) law—focused primarily on legal texts, registration procedures, and a few case laws—is becoming increasingly obsolete. This method that emphasizes the application and granting of patents, trademarks, designs, and rules on copyright and trade -secret protections, fails to equip students with the tools needed to navigate the complexities of a rapidly evolving technological landscape. As technology continues to advance at an unprecedented pace, IP law students face growing challenges in understanding, applying, and critically analyzing legal frameworks in real-world contexts. To address this, it is no longer adequate to teach IP law solely from a legalistic perspective aimed at serving corporate interests. In the age of emerging technologies, IP education need to adjust several competing interests such as corporate (investment/economic), individual (moral/privacy/human rights) and societal interests (access/environmental). It is vital to incorporate socio-technological and human rights dimensions into the IP curriculum. A futureproof IP education need to adopt a problem-based, critical thinking and interdisciplinary approach. Students should not only study legal texts but also explore how these laws might be interpreted and applied in uncertain, risk-laden, and technologically dynamic environments. Since legal reforms cannot keep pace with every technological innovation, it is the interpretive and interdisciplinary understanding of IP law that will enable future practitioners to address emerging challenges—particularly those intersecting with fundamental rights.

In my teaching, I have developed two interdisciplinary models to address this need.

The first, focused on AI and IP law, begins with students mapping the future of AI using the "Five L&W" framework: Love, Live, Learn, Labour, Legal/regulatory, and War. This is followed by an analysis of relevant technologies from an IP perspective and their implications for fundamental rights. Finally, students propose legal and policy solutions.

The second model, centered on green technologies and role of IP, uses an interconnected approach. Students begin by examining a classic environmental or societal problem through the lens of fundamental rights and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They then explore technological solutions and assess how IP law can support, rather than hinder, accessibility, affordability, and long-term sustainability.

My experience suggests that IP education must be reimagined through the lens of "future-proofing." This involves integrating interdisciplinary and critical perspectives into the curriculum to ensure that students are prepared to address both technological change and fundamental rights in their future legal practice. By doing so, we can ensure that IP law remains relevant, responsive, and socially relevant in the technological age and from the perspectives of fundamental rights too. 

The European Green Deal (EGD) is a roadmap to facilitate the transition of the European Union (EU) to become climate-neutral by 2050. Although the green deal has a strong legal basis out of the article 192 of the TFEU, the success of the EGD is subject to a complex legal process as soft law policy instruments need to be transformed into binding secondary legislation. Even this legal arrangement is dependent on varied legal competences such as exclusive, shared and supporting while allowing the member states procedural autonomy. This presentation investigates to what extent EU environmental law ready to deliver EGD particularly to reduce resource consumption and accelerate circular economy by promoting sustainable product design, reuse, re-sale and recycling. EU intellectual property (IP) law promote investment and innovation in new technologies, which are necessary for the sustainability transitions. However, EU environmental law and IP law have different justifications such as sustainability transitions is a core objectives of the EU environmental law whereas sustainability dimension has a little or no relevance in granting IP protection as it makes no distinction between polluted technology and sustainable technology. 

 This issue requires further research considering conflicting views and perspectives such as in one way EU environmental law promotes reuse, re-sale and recycling while IP law could become a hindrance to such reuse, re-sale and recycling without the permission of the original IP rights holder. This presentation intended to contribute by way of identifying possible means and ways to take a coherent approach between EU environmental law and IP law to facilitate sustainability transitions and deliver EGD with special reference to the sectors of vital importance such as energy sector. 

• 3 statements for open the discussion with the public-

-European Green deal intends to accelerate circular economy and sustainable energy transitions.

-EU environmental law intends to reduce resource consumptions therefore promotes re-sale, re-use and recycling while Intellectual property law has no such directions.

-A coherent approach is necessary between EU environmental law and IP law to deliver sustainability and accelerate circular economy

Unlike other least developed countries (LDCs), Bangladesh has a strong pharmaceutical industry. The country was able to develop its pharmaceutical industry partly because of the pharmaceutical patent waiver issued to the LDCs under the World Trade Organization's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). The country is scheduled to be a developing country in 2026 hence might not continue pharmaceutical patent waiver unlike other LDCs after 2026. It is vital for the pharmaceutical firms in Bangladesh to prepare for the TRIPS-compliant patent regime and to initiate a process of change for transforming from mere imitation of technologies to innovative industry and capacity building for developing new drugs in future. Considering limited technical and financial capacity for developing new drugs among the pharmaceutical firms in Bangladesh, this study anaylzes new drug development tendencies among the large pharmaceutical firms in Bangladesh using the commercial database Cortellis by Clarivate. It compares the analytical results on Bangladesh with those on other developing countries (such as India) that changed its patenting system from a process patent structure to a product patent system. This study will give meaningful knowledge and information to other LDC countries which might graduate from LDC status in the future.

The issues of intellectual property (IP) have become so complicated day by day due to having options for integrating diverse socio-economic, multicultural, and multilateral perspectives in analyzing international and regional IP conventions and even national IP laws. The problem is very few laws schools train IP students to deal with the global challenges rather than equipping them mainly out of the national context. This result in IP students might end up without gaining exposure to real world scenarios and without understanding of diversified options for interpretating IP law issues from international and regional perspectives such as issues of IP and public health, IP and climate change, role of IP in Sustainable Development Goals and so on. Many graduates from the law schools come out without ever learning to be comfortable to deal with complex IP issues and evaluate IP from global sustainability challenges and even broader national and regional context. I designed several IP courses in the global south and in the north and my inspiration in IP teaching is to equip students to deal with the global challenges and make a difference in using IP from diverse global, regional and national contexts such as how can IP facilitate access to medicines, how can IP facilitate not only new innovation in climate technologies but also transfer of such technologies around the world and even be able to develop tools and use IP as an policy instrument to balance the rights of the innovators, consumers and preserve biological diversity and cultural heritage while promoting innovation and commercialization too. After attending my classes and completing courses, students feel empowered and satisfied to be able to IP not only as an incentive for commercialization but also as an instrument and tool to contribute to global sustainable development, putting IP from national development challenges and using IP for the preservation of biological diversity, cultural heritage and thereby be able to use IP strategically by leaving no one behind. For example, by participating in IP and climate change moot from stakeholder perspectives students received valuable understanding of how IP can both become barrier or incentive to facilitate development, diffusion, and deployment of climate technologies around the world.  Putting students from different national and regional health challenges and asking them to come up with solutions to help the communities using IP, students received understanding of how IP can be used to facilitate accessibility and affordability of medicines at the national and regional levels. Using simulation on IP cases from different socio-cultural contexts, students are equipped with using IP with empathy and humanitarian perspectives to give IP a human face rather than simply a tool to profit maximization. The feedback from the students reflected that after completing courses students feel comfortable dealing with global challenges and realized that IP is not simply an incentive to gain but much more to deliver using IP.

Bangladesh’s more than $30 billion textile industries are vital to its economy as generating around 20 percent of GDP and over 80 percent of total export earnings, while employing more than 4.5 million people. But garment factories have become a serious environmental threat for Bangladesh due to unsustainable consumption and production process consuming around 1,500 billion litres of water annually, which aggravates falling ground water levels and contaminating waterways and surrounding environments, which has become a serious threat to human health, food production, and natural environment. Considering these climate threats and unsustainable practices to textile sector in Bangladesh, this research will explore how can promoting local innovation and having transfer of climate technologies for the relevant sector of Bangladesh, the country could transform into climate smart textile production to deliver sustainability and accelerate circular economy and thereby to attain targets of the SDGs (particularly SDGs 1, 12 and 13). The aim of this presentation is to explore how can international climate change law (particularly the Paris Agreement) and intellectual property law (with reference to the World Trade Organizations’ TRIPS Agreement) facilitate climate smart textile production in Bangladesh to deliver sustainability and accelerate circular economy. This presentation would like to shed lights on the potential means for Bangladesh for utilizing international legal mechanisms for the sustainability transitions of the textile sector.