The coastal ecosystems represent juridically complex spaces, where the issues of climate change and increased human presence intersect, and thus demonstrate significant weaknesses in the structure and application of the international environmental law. In this paper, a critical analysis of tourism-based coastal development is done as a cumulative factor of an environmental stress that at the same time increases climate vulnerability and intensifies the climate-related destruction of coastal and marine ecosystems. It locates such development within the disrupted legal regimes that control climate change, marine environmental protection, and biodiversity conservation, questioning the overall ability of these legal regimes to control climate-enhanced coastal erosion.
Attention is directed to how international jurisprudence has developed a statement of State obligations, by conducting a doctrinal study of some of the major principles on which it is founded, such as the no-harm principle, the obligation of prevention, environmental due diligence and precaution, but also widely leaves room in how it is applied. Using the judgments of the International Court of Justice, the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea, the analysis identifies an enduring loophole between the express acknowledgment of the existence of preventive obligations and how they can be practicalised in terms of the sector-specific coastal business operations. The process of shoreline change led by tourism, which is often justified by development or adaptation discourses, reveals the shortages of existing law legal standards of significant harm in an environment of cumulative and predictable risk.
Further consideration is given to the compartmentalised way of thinking about climate change and coastal ecosystem protection taken by the key treaty regimes, that is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Paris Agreement. This kind of fragmentation has been shown to undermine accountability as it concentrates regulatory responsibility in a diffused, but weakly co-ordinated set of legal frameworks, which in turn results in poor enforcement. States more exposed to climate change and less powerful in regulation present an outrageously high ecological and legal risk, especially when economic reliance on coastal development is combined with increased exposure to climate risk.The article argues that the reliance of the international environmental law on loose standards, procedural requirements, and more of soft enforcement has limited its ability to address climate-enhanced and development-induced damage in coastal areas. It wraps up by proposing more comprehensive and enforceable using due diligence and ecosystem-based governance, thus making this able to tackle cumulative degradation of coastal areas in a climate that is ever-warming.