Speaking Part 2 · NatureIn the Sep–Dec 2026 reported set
Describe a Law on Environmental Protection
In short
“Describe a Law on Environmental Protection” is a common IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card. You get 1 minute to prepare and should speak for 1–2 minutes, covering all four points below. This page gives you a Band 9 model answer, an idea map so you can make it your own, the Part 3 follow-up questions with answers, and the vocabulary examiners reward.
The task card
Describe a Law on Environmental Protection. You should say:
- •What the law is
- •How you know about it
- •What effect it has had
- •And explain whether you think it is effective
Band 9 model answer
The law I'll talk about is the charge on single-use plastic bags, which where I live means shops are legally required to charge for every bag rather than handing them out free. It's an unglamorous piece of legislation and I find it genuinely interesting for that reason.
I know about it the way everyone does, which is by being caught out by it. It came in while I was at university, and I distinctly remember the first few months of standing at tills discovering I'd have to pay for something that had always been free, and being mildly annoyed about it. It was also covered heavily at the time, with a fair amount of complaining in the press about petty interference.
The effect has been much larger than anybody expected. Bag use fell by something in the region of eighty or ninety per cent within the first year or two, depending on which figures you read, and the behaviour change was essentially permanent — a reusable bag in a coat pocket is now completely normal and nobody thinks about it. You can see it on beaches too: plastic bags used to be one of the commonest things picked up on beach cleans and they've dropped a long way down that list.
As for whether it's effective, I'd say yes, but I want to be precise about what it was effective at. It has not solved plastic pollution, which is overwhelmingly driven by packaging, fishing gear and industrial waste rather than shopping bags — so anyone treating this law as a serious environmental measure is mistaken. What it did brilliantly was change a habit, at essentially no cost to the government, by using price rather than prohibition.
And that's why I find it worth discussing. It didn't ban anything. You can still have a bag; you just have to notice that you're taking one. That tiny friction turned out to be enough, which suggests that an enormous amount of wasteful behaviour isn't a considered choice at all, it's just the default.
My honest reservation is that its real effect may have been political rather than environmental — it let a lot of people feel they'd done something while the far bigger sources went untouched. But as a demonstration that small, well-designed rules can shift behaviour, it's one of the clearest examples I know of.
Make it your own: three angles
A plastic bag charge or single-use plastics ban
The easiest to describe concretely because you have lived through it, and the effect is measurable — which is what the third bullet needs.
Recycling or waste separation rules
Good if your area has specific requirements. Lets you talk about compliance and enforcement, which most candidates skip.
Emissions or vehicle restrictions in a city
Strong for cause and effect and connects directly to the Part 3 questions about transport and air quality.
What the examiner is listening for
This card invites slogans, and slogans score badly. The fix is precision: name ONE law, say what it actually requires, and give a concrete effect. The fourth bullet asks whether it works, so take a position and qualify it — the model says yes, then narrows what it was effective AT, which is exactly the kind of reasoning Part 3 rewards.
Part 1 warm-up questions
- Do you recycle at home?
- Is pollution a problem where you live?
- Do you use public transport for environmental reasons?
- Are people in your country concerned about the environment?
Part 3 follow-up questions & answers
Are environmental laws effective?
It varies enormously with how they're designed. The ones that work tend to target a single, visible behaviour and make the alternative easy — the bag charge, the phasing out of leaded petrol, the ozone treaties. The ones that fail tend to set distant targets with no enforcement, so the political cost falls on a future government. Specificity and enforcement matter far more than ambition.
Who should be responsible for protecting the environment — individuals or governments?
Both, but not equally, and I think the balance has been deliberately misrepresented. Individual choices matter at the margin, but the decisions with real scale — energy generation, transport infrastructure, what industry is permitted to emit — sit with governments and large companies. Framing it primarily as personal responsibility has been quite a convenient position for the organisations with the largest footprints.
Should companies be punished for polluting?
They should, and the penalty needs to exceed what they saved by polluting, or it simply becomes a cost of doing business. That's the usual failure — fines set low enough that breaking the rule remains the rational choice. I'd also argue for personal liability for executives in serious cases, because corporate fines are ultimately paid by shareholders and customers rather than by anyone who made the decision.
Do people care more about the environment than in the past?
Concern has clearly risen, particularly among younger people, and it's now a mainstream political issue rather than a fringe one. Whether behaviour has changed proportionally is doubtful — consumption has kept rising, and stated concern and actual choices diverge sharply when there's a cost involved. So the attitude shift is real and the behaviour shift is much more modest.
How can governments encourage people to be more environmentally friendly?
The evidence fairly consistently favours changing defaults over persuading people. Making the green option the automatic one, adding small frictions to the wasteful one, and pricing the harm in all outperform information campaigns, which people agree with and then ignore. The bag charge is a good example — nobody was persuaded of anything, the default just changed.
Is economic growth compatible with protecting the environment?
It depends entirely on what's growing. Growth in services, efficiency and clean energy can clearly coexist with falling emissions, and several countries have managed it. Growth in resource extraction and consumption cannot. So the honest answer is that some growth is compatible and some isn't, and treating growth as a single undifferentiated thing is what makes the argument unresolvable.
Useful vocabulary
| Word / phrase | Meaning |
|---|---|
| single-use | designed to be thrown away after one use |
| to come into force | to start applying legally |
| to phase something out | to remove it gradually |
| a levy | a charge imposed by a government |
| a carbon footprint | the total emissions something causes |
| to curb | to limit or restrain |
| to comply with | to obey a rule or law |
| a deterrent | something that discourages behaviour |
| to offset | to compensate for something |
| a default | what happens if you make no choice |
More cue cards
Describe a Park or Garden You Like
Preparing for the whole test, not just Speaking?
Practise Reading with unlimited AI-generated Cambridge-style passages and trap-level feedback, and check your Writing against the official criteria — free to start.