Responses of the Ecological and Environmental Legal System to Climate Policy under the "Dual Carbon" Goals

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the in-depth transformation of global climate governance and the full advancement of China's "Dual Carbon" strategy, climate policy is accelerating its shift from flexible guidance to rigid constraints, exerting sustained structural impacts on the ecological and environmental legal system. There exists a threefold relationship between climate policy and environmental law: homologous goals, complementary functions, and heterogeneous logic, which gives rise to inherent tensions in three dimensions: legitimacy, rights protection, and systemic coherence. This paper argues that the response of environmental law to climate policy should not remain at the one-way transplantation of policy legalization. Instead, it should take the "holistic systemic view" as the methodological guidance, establish total carbon emission control, climate risk prevention, and just transition as the normative core, and realize the leap from fragmented responses to systemic integration. The Ecological and Environmental Code , adopted in March 2026, dedicates a specific part to "Green and Low-Carbon Development", incorporating core systems such as total carbon emission control, carbon assessment, and carbon emission trading into the basic environmental law, marking a critical step toward systemic integration. On this basis, it is still necessary to formulate a specialized Climate Change Response Law to form a collaborative framework of "basic law + specialized law", so as to provide a logically consistent normative scheme for the full legalization of the carbon neutrality goal.