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Media are essential actors in transmitting, contesting and embedding the attitudes towards climate change, yet media performance in post-communist countries has been relatively little researched. Informed by conceptual frameworks of strategic narratives, agenda-setting and framing, this paper investigates the media coverage of climate change and environment related issues in Latvia. The paper demonstrates the representation of climate change and environment related issues in Latvian and Russian-speaking traditional and online media, using quantitative data analysis of 3753 media articles, video and audio broadcasts from August 2020 till January 2021, as well as qualitative content analysis of seven peaks. The findings reveal a significant amount of climate change and environment related articles and broadcasts in Latvian media. News agencies and public broadcasters are the most important media segments in terms of publishing, whereas online media are prior in terms of the audiences reached. International efforts emerge as a dominant theme in the media coverage, while climate change per se receives a minor journalist attention. Both observations confirm a low level of climate change domestication in the Latvian media. Media reliance on political and government information sources and prepackaged material suggests a high potential for official political narratives to spread, yet the persuasive power of strategic narratives remains blurred as the perception side is highly underreported.

The significance of environmental governance is increasing worldwide, and Georgia is no exception. This article uses wide-ranging sources to provide comprehensive qualitative and quantitative data to discuss the most important aspects of environmental policy directions in Georgia. The results of the study show that: (a) it is crucial to increase public awareness about the importance of climate change and environmental protection; (b) introducing environmental and climate-related goals and objectives and green budgeting principles in national priorities is as important as implementing them effectively into practice; and (c) the practice of regulatory impact assessment needs further development in Georgia, especially in the environment and climate-related areas. Finally, the paper concludes that the lack of historical data is the main limitation for the current research, and proposes that scientific and practical work continues in the future to further explore the relationships between the country’s environmental policies and aspects of sustainable development on both an individual and public level.

This paper analyses, if the Intertemporal Guarantee of Freedom, that was developed by the German Federal Constitutional Court (GFCC), can be used to expand the protection of human rights against the harms of climate change. The case of the Swiss Senior Women shows that there are jurisdictions, where the Intertemporal Guarantee of Freedom could be applied to improve standing and the control standard of states’ climate change action. Within international law bodies with jurisdiction over human rights treaties there are distinctive standards of protection against the harms of climate change. A major deficit within the international human rights protection against climate change lies within the focus on the positive obligations and the corresponding wide margin of appreciation granted to the states. The Intertemporal Guarantee of Freedom could provide a protection expansion in this regard, especially in the case of the European Court of Human Rights. It could also enable and legitimise present human rights concerns focused on the future actions of states following their past inaction. One considerable hurdle that is not addressed by it are procedural hurdles like the Plaumann formula applied by the European Court of Justice. The Intertemporal Guarantee of Freedom cannot solve major problems for climate change litigation like procedural hurdles. Yet, it can provide a new approach for complaints to address unambitious mitigation legislation which will lead to future human rights infringements.