First of two parts
FIFTY-THREE years after the first United Nations International Conference on the Environment was held in Stockholm in 1972, the world experienced the steady emergence and growth of environmental law as a new field of law to deal with environmental problems on a national and global scale.
There are many areas under the rubric of environmental law. Some of the earliest environmental legislations concern the protection of the environment from polluting materials and by extension, aim to improve public health. However, pollution now is more about contaminant cleanup, safe use of chemicals, waste management and water quality for multiple water use.
Sustainability of resources is the other area of environmental application about which we have now the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It means the ability to sustain a resource based on relatively recent scientific principles: biodiversity as it relates in particular to food security for the world’s burgeoning population; increased dependence on renewable energy; and chemical cycling. Targets for sustainability are forest and land resources, mineral resources, and water resources, as well as wildlife and fisheries, all of which connect to the impact assessment and monitoring strategy. In short, sustainability is about how to best manage and use natural resources.
In many ways, environmental laws are often a form of insurance policy for the future for such necessities as food and water. There will come a time when resources are diminished or, at worst, gone, and that is the reason it is important to ensure their wise use as possible.
Mention should also be made that there is a campaign for a country platform that will aid in placing nature at the forefront of climate action efforts. The platform should prioritize the protection of biodiversity for food security and relies on funding commitments to implement projects worldwide, many of which are nature-based solutions that support climate mitigation and adaptation.
Revisiting environmental law education in PH
Briefly, the University of the Philippines College of Law was the first to offer environmental law as a two-unit optional course in its curriculum in 1992. A few Filipino pioneers in the new field of law worked on the first reference book on the subject along with a syllabus prepared by the same group. Submission of a paper on a Philippine environmental problem with law as a solution became a feature of the newly introduced course.
In 1993, by virtue of Republic Act 7662, the Legal Education Board (LEB) was created as the government agency responsible for the regulation of law education including supervision of all law schools in the Philippines. To reform and uplift the standards of legal education became its primary policy.
The board introduced reforms which include stricter selection of law students and law professors; improvements in quality of instruction and facilities; and attendance in continuing legal education seminars for practicing attorneys.
Environmental law became a mandatory or required three-unit subject in all law schools in the Philippines. The indefatigable Dean Ulpiano Sarmiento III immediately incorporated environmental law as a course in the curriculum of the San Beda Alabang School of Law in compliance therewith.
After a while, LEB launched a revised law curriculum which reduced the environmental law course to two units and introduced a clinical legal education scheme that focuses on practice readiness of law students instead of concentration on the bar exams while in law school. It was found that focus on passing the bar exams instead of law practice readiness has been the root of the very low percentage of bar passers since independence in 1946.
Right now, when a legal clinic is maintained in a law school, legal consultation and even assisted court appearances of law students by members of the bar are provided to the public.
Be that as it may, environmental law has to compete with bar subjects such as criminal law, civil law, political law, commercial law and remedial law. Students simply consider environmental law as a respite from those bar subjects as it shifts from time to time from pollution law to climate change law, to biodiversity law, to public health law, unlike bar subjects which are strictly on only one topic as a classroom course during the semester.
By chance, the Supreme Court bar exams committee bravely changed or overhauled the bar exam thrust for the distressingly twice postponed 2020 exams. When the results were released, 72.28 percent of the takers hurdled the exams — a high in bar exams memory but “dramatically” surpassed, in many ways, by the results of the 2025 bar exams.
The 2020 bar exams chairman, Associate Justice Marvic Leonen, called on the new lawyers of the first digitalized and localized licensure test in history to use their newfound privilege “to advance social justice,” referring to the lot of the poor and disadvantaged sector of society. Apparently, sharing a thought that henceforth Philippine legal education should also be student-and-society-centered.
With the great leap forward of developments in environmental law as narrated above, environmental law training courses for professors were conducted by LEB alongside webinars organized by the Asian Research Institute for Environmental Law, Asian Development Bank and the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law.
To be concluded on May 9, 2026
