This chapter looks, inter alia, at how international law has been used or could be used to help tackle the most significant environmental challenge of our time. This challenge is global climate change. Not many topics provide a good illustration of the importance of a globally inclusive regulatory regime focused on preventive and precautionary approaches to environmental harm—or of the problems of negotiating one on such a complex subject. Solutions to global climate change have not been easily forthcoming. The chapter looks at the efforts of the international regulatory regime to address these challenges by recourse to novel ‘market based’ mechanisms and differential treatment. An example is the post-Kyoto scheme for reducing greenhouse gas emissions through ‘nationally determined contributions’. In the end, the chapter argues, it is likely to be technology that enables us to grapple with the causes of climate change, not law, but law can drive technological change, as it has with ozone depletion and acid rain.
Chapter
6. Climate Change and Atmospheric Pollution
Chapter
11. Conservation of Nature, Ecosystems, and Biodiversity
Our survival on earth, this chapter argues, depends on the conservation of the world’s natural resources. These resources comprise of soil, water, the atmosphere, plants, trees, and other life forms. The chapter looks at the earth’s current ‘ecological footprint’ and the future of that ecological footprint as it stands now. There is now widespread scientific consensus that biodiversity is being lost, and that pressures on biodiversity are increasing. The chapter asks what we can do about this, in terms of international law. The chapter identifies how international law seeks to ensure the protection and conservation and sustainable use of nature, its ecosystems and biodiversity, and the effectiveness of measures developed to conserve land?based living resources, forests, and deserts.
Chapter
12. Conservation of Marine Living Resources
This chapter argues that the conservation of marine living resources presents complex problems of regulation and management. The oceans represent the least understood ecosystem on this earth and this makes the conservation of marine life and resources, and the regulation of such, very difficult and complicated. The chapter gives an overview of the law as it stands. International law on conservation and sustainable use of marine living resources has developed very slowly thus far. Effective regimes for conservation of marine living resources have to address not only sustainable use of targeted stocks, but also incidental catch of other species, conservation of biological diversity, and protection of the marine ecosystems which provide the main habitat for fish stocks and other species. The chapter concludes that developing a legal regime that provides for sustainable use and conservation of the ocean’s living resources and biological diversity within the framework of the general law of the sea will continue to remain problematic.
Chapter
5. Non-State Actors: Environmental Rights, Liability, and Crimes
This chapter turns to some of the environmental rights and obligations which attach to individuals, corporations, and NGOs in international law. The chapter considers some alternative approaches to the implementation and enforcement of international environmental law. Relying less on interstate claims, or on mechanisms of international supervision, the development of human-rights approaches to environmental protection and the economic logic of the polluter-pays principle have made claims by individuals an increasingly attractive means of dealing with domestic or transboundary environmental problems. But the diversity of the issues needs emphasis in this context also. National remedies are not necessarily alternatives to the systems considered in the last chapter, but are more often complementary to it, and only in certain respects more useful. The variety of approaches now available for the resolution of international environmental disputes does indicate the increasing sophistication of the international legal system, the chapter argues.
Chapter
1. International Law and the Environment
This chapter provides an overview of the purpose of this book. It starts by saying what the book does not expect to do. The text does not intend to answer the question whether the law we have now serves the needs of environmental justice or fairness among nations, generations, or peoples. It does, however, attempt to show, inter alia, how international law has developed a framework for cooperation on environmental matters between developed and developing states; for the adoption of measures aimed at control of pollution and conservation and sustainable use of natural resources; for the resolution of international environmental disputes; for the promotion of greater transparency and public participation in environmental decision-making; and for the adoption and harmonization of national environmental law.
