The Global Environment

Institutions, Law, and Policy

Regina S. Axelrod, Stacy D. VanDeveer

• Publisher: CQ Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781544358062
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The new edition of this award-winning volume reflects the latest events in the in global environmental politics and sustainable development, while providing balanced coverage of the key institutions, environmental issues, treaties, and policies. The book highlights global environmental institutions, major state and non-state actors, and includes a wide range of cases such as climate change, biodiversity, hazardous chemicals, ozone layer depletion, nuclear energy and resource consumption.

1 Governing the Global Environment

Regina S. Axelrod

Stacy D. VanDeveer

Humans change their environments. We use and waste vast quantities of resources, creating massive pollution in the process. Environmental change is driven by the things we eat, build, make, buy, and throw away—and by the decisions we make as citizens and voters. Over the past few decades we have acquired the power to change the planet’s climate. The early twenty-first century finds the Earth’s physical and biological systems under unprecedented strain. The growing human population is approaching eight billion, and the global economy has grown to about $80 trillion annually. The United Nations estimates that one-third of the world’s people live in countries with moderate to high shortages of fresh water. Many of the world’s largest cities are choked by pollution, like its oceans, rivers, and atmosphere. As carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases build up in the atmosphere, the average surface temperature of the Earth has reached the highest level ever recorded, measured on an annual basis, as glaciers and polar ice recede. The biological diversity of the planet is under heavy stress. A mass extinction of plants and animals is underway, and some predict that a quarter of all species could be pushed to extinction by 2050, as a consequence of global warming alone. Without question, human impacts on the biosphere remain one of the most critical issues of the century.

Scientists and conservationists have recognized the threats to the Earth’s flora and fauna, water systems, and atmosphere for more than a century, but only in the past four or five decades have nations begun to address these issues on a global scale. The 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) in Stockholm, Sweden, attended by 113 states, marked the beginning of organized international efforts to devise a comprehensive agenda to safeguard the environment while also promoting economic development. Although no binding treaties were adopted at Stockholm, the conference established the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), creating a permanent forum for monitoring global environmental trends, convening international meetings and conferences, and negotiating international agreements. Among UNEP’s most important achievements are the 1985 Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer and the binding 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer.¹ In 1987 the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED, also known as the Brundtland Commission for its chair, former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland) issued its historic report Our Common Future, which called for a new era of “sustainable development.”² To begin implementing this strategy, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), known as the Earth Summit, was convened in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 1992. The conference produced major international treaties on climate change and biodiversity, two declarations of principle, and a lengthy action program (Agenda 21) for implementing sustainable development around the world. Ten years later, in August 2002, 191 nations attended the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa, to reassess and renew commitments to sustainable development.³ Another ten years found public, private, and civil society actors returning to Rio for the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, or Rio+20. Two more recent “milestones” of global environmental governance await history’s verdict regarding their import: the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals⁴ and the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change (see Chapter 10).

As a result of such diplomatic achievements and the politics, policy making, and activism that surround them—from local activists, corporations, and governments to national governments and global summits—a system for global environmental governance exists. This system consists of states and hundreds of intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations and UNEP (and dozens of issue-specific organizations set up by treaties) and thousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (see Chapter 2), a framework of international environmental law based on several hundred multilateral treaties and agreements (see Chapter 3), and a diverse host of complex international cooperation regimes and other governance arrangements (see Chapter 4).

Hundreds of bilateral and regional treaties and organizations, such as those involving the United Nations Regional Seas Programme and the European Union (see Chapter 7), deal with dozens of transboundary and shared resource issues. By one count, 1,190 multilateral international agreements (MEAs) and more than 1,500 bilateral environmental agreements are currently in effect.⁵ Some date back to the nineteenth century, focusing on river navigation and migratory bird protection, for example, whereas others, like the Minamata Convention on Mercury pollution, were signed in 2013 (see Chapter 11).

Vast numbers of small and large nongovernmental organizations, including international environmental interest groups, scientific bodies, business and trade associations, women’s groups, and indigenous peoples’ organizations, also play important roles in international environmental governance (see Chapter 2). Environmental activists and NGOs are now found all around the globe, engaged in politics and social action and organizing from neighborhoods and local communities to national and global politics.⁶ These organizations participate in international negotiations, help to monitor treaty compliance, and often play leading roles in implementing policies. In other words, sometimes states delegate authority to civil society organizations.⁷ At the 2002 Johannesburg summit, more than twenty thousand individuals registered as participants, and countless others attended the parallel Global People’s Forum and summit of indigenous peoples.⁸ In 2015, as the Paris Climate summit was opening, millions took part in over 2,000 climate marches and demonstrations in about 175 countries around the world. The increasing access to and transparency of international environmental governance is one of the most remarkable achievements of the emerging global environmental governance system.

Despite these strides, the perception that the current international governance system remains weak and too ineffective is growing.⁹ Many international environmental institutions lack adequate funding and effective enforcement mechanisms. Because no world government or global sovereign political authority exists, international agencies often work at cross-purposes—and all rely on individual states to carry out promised policies. States are reluctant to relinquish sovereignty and their right to pursue their individual national interests. Consequently, many trends and patterns of global environmental degradation have not been reversed, leaving us on a path toward devastating ecological crises unless global institutions are strengthened and public, private-sector, and civil society actors—and individual citizens and consumers—take on far more responsibility for environmental governance.

Global cooperation generally requires leadership, and the role of the United States in international environmental diplomacy has often been disappointing, given that it was once a global leader. Although the Clinton administration signed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which set targets and timetables for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, neither this treaty nor others, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Basel Convention on the trade in hazardous wastes, and agreements covering biosafety and a host of transboundary air pollutants, were ratified by the U.S. Senate. President George W. Bush repudiated the Kyoto Protocol in 2001 and showed little interest in other multilateral environmental agreements and institutions for most of his eight years in office. U.S. indifference—sometimes presidential and sometimes congressional—often results in deep divisions between the United States and both the European Union and developing nations of the Global South (see Chapters 6, 7, 9, 10, and 12).¹⁰

In 2009, the Obama administration arrived in Washington, D.C., pledging to return to domestic environmental policy making and steer the United States toward reengagement in global environmental cooperation (and in other areas of multilateral politics). Such changes take time and require the support of Congress and the American people. Congress repeatedly opposed environmental initiatives—ignoring calls to act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to set clear regulations for hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and natural gas extraction, and to enact serious energy efficiency regulation—and struggled to sustain even modest support for renewable energy generation. A reelected President Barack Obama pledged to lead on climate change and other environmental issues in both domestic and global politics, but his administration’s ability to do so was constrained by congressional inaction and opposition. In his second term, Obama initiated a series of executive actions and EPA-driven regulatory processes, engendering ongoing opposition but pushing through a large suite of environmental actions via executive branch processes and authorities.

The arrival of the Trump administration in 2017 brought policies favoring unregulated business activity and fossil fuel extraction and use, cutting back the federal government’s ability to sustain environmental policy. Early on, “climate change” and climate change–related science and information were culled from official discourse and government websites. The U.S. president declared his administration pro-coal and pro-business, proposing huge budget cuts for the EPA and appointing cabinet members with long histories of hostility and opposition to environmental regulations. Two years of changes—generally all rollbacks—in environmental regulations for cleaner air and water have not yet revived the coal industry, but they do impact the health and well-being of Americans and people around the globe. By late 2018 the New York Times catalogued almost eighty such environmental rollbacks completed or in process, with another two dozen attempted but stalled or defeated in the courts.¹¹ And 2018 saw renewed increases in both global and U.S. climate change emissions.¹²

Yet even when times are dark for environmental advocates and scientists, the picture is more complex than it seems at first glance. During times when the U.S. federal government largely abandoned environmental policy development in the early years of this century, many U.S. states and cities continued to make policy in response to international environmental challenges. Many states, for example, enacted policies to combat climate change and expand renewable energy generation even when the federal government was opposed to doing so.¹³ Also, as the Trump administration moved to roll back environmental regulations, some large and small U.S. companies from many sectors have opposed such moves, moving instead to invest more in solar and other renewable energies, clean vehicles, and other sustainability policies. And the environmental actions of the leading U.S. states, cities, and private sector are not confined by the U.S. border. They actively participate in global networks and summits, such as the annual UN meetings on climate change, as they seek to provide global leadership where the U.S. federal government refuses to do so. Furthermore, leaders need not come only from the United States. As the chapters in this volume make clear, global leadership can come from the EU, China, and other countries in the Global North or Global South—and from civil society and the private sector.

This book presents an overview of the development of international environmental institutions, laws, and policies and attempts to assess their adequacy. Authors discuss developments since World War II, emphasizing important trends since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and important recent developments. They share an optimism that people and nations can work together to address global problems and growing concern, sometimes bordering on pessimism, about trends in twenty-first-century global environmental degradation and governance. They take a longer view in evaluating emerging environmental regimes, because global cooperation is difficult to establish and sustain on all issues. Most contributors to this volume argue that there are important lessons to learn and reasons for hope. They caution, however, that more serious attention to global environmental governance is required of citizens and governments alike if disturbing and dangerous trends are to be reversed.

The past fifty years have seen dramatic and often surprising political and economic changes from which this volume seeks to learn. In addition to the large global summits on the environment and sustainable human development, the past twenty-five years witnessed developments such as the end of apartheid in South Africa, the collapse of Soviet-style communism in Eastern Europe and across the Soviet Union, and a host of other transitions to democratic rule in Latin America and elsewhere. These changes brought unprecedented (if uneven) growth in the number of democracies in the world. The same era witnessed deepening European integration and expansion of the European Union from twelve countries to twenty-eight member states, even as the EU faced a set of significant challenges. China, India, Brazil, and several other developing countries have roared into the global economy, reshaping aspects of their domestic politics, international relations, and global resource and environmental trends—and lifting hundreds of millions out of grinding poverty. These developments can both affect and inspire global environmental governance. For example, many of these political and economic changes help drive ever-increasing use of the Earth’s resources (along with the seemingly never-ending growth in North American–style consumption). Yet if Europeans can overcome generations of war to build a unified Europe and citizens living under nondemocratic governments can demand their democratic and basic human rights and replace dictators with elected officials, then it may be possible for humankind to reverse global environmental degradation and build effective global environmental governance institutions to engender sustainable development around the globe.

This chapter’s next two sections provide a brief overview of the theoretical context for studying international environmental governance. The first summarizes the most important perspectives from international relations theory relevant to the emergence of international environmental institutions and law. The second discusses the concept of sustainable development, which became the dominant ideological framework for global environmental policies in the 1990s. The continuing importance of sustainability as one of the defining concepts of our time can be seen both in the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals, which seek to set environmental and development priorities through 2030, and in the many sustainability initiatives across the public, private, and civil society sectors at every level of scale. The third section outlines the organization and contents of the book, briefly discussing each of the three parts: (I) international environmental actors and institutions; (II) big players in global environmental policy making; and (III) cases, controversies, and challenges in global environmental governance. A short conclusion summarizes some of the book’s main themes.

International Relations, Regimes, and Governance

International politics and governance institutions associated with environmental and sustainable development issues have produced a large and growing body of social science research and analysis.¹⁴ Similarly, a large body of international relations theory is applicable to the development of international environmental institutions and agreements (see Chapter 4).¹⁵ The study of international relations has traditionally been dominated by two broad theoretical schools: realism and liberalism. “Realists” view the world as an anarchic collection of sovereign nation-states, each of which is a unitary actor in pursuing its unique national interests. These interests are largely defined in terms of relative power and security compared with other states. In this perspective, nation-states do not cooperate with one another unless it is clearly in their self-interest to do so, and cooperative behavior will continue only as long as the parties perceive this condition to be met. International laws and institutions are thus essentially instruments for promoting or defending na...