Right to environment, balancing of competing interests and proportionality

Addressing collisions between environmental protection and competing economic and social interests often constitutes the very core of environmental cases. At the constitutional level, a balancing approach based on the doctrine of proportionality is frequently employed to resolve contradictions between conflicting values. In this article, I demonstrate how the proportionality doctrine in its traditional meaning can be applied to balancing interests in environmental cases. Then I bring to the forefront two innovative ways of engaging proportionality in the environmental protection; one employing proportionality as an interpretative instrument with the power to help determining the scope and content of the right to environment; and the other adjusting proportionality to the form of eco-proportionality, offering a restructured framework to rule the human-nature relationship.