International environmental law

DEFINITION: Internationally accepted rules governing the conduct of sovereign nations in their relationships with one another for the international regulation of environmental issues aimed at environmental protection and sustainability

International environmental laws regulate the interactions of human beings with the rest of the biophysical or natural environment, with the aim of reducing the negative impacts of human activity on the natural environment.

International environmental laws promote responses to serious threats to the global and address some of the most challenging global issues, especially in areas of trade and environment, protection, climate change, oceans and fisheries, water scarcity, endangered species, and access to biological resources. Because does not respect international or political boundaries, environmental law is an important aspect of international relations.

Encompassing agreements among nations, international environmental laws fall into two broad categories: pollution control and remediation, and resource conservation and management. The boundaries of international environmental law are difficult to determine, and therefore it cannot usually be restricted to one specific definition. Rather, it is interdisciplinary and also overlaps and intersects with numerous other areas of research, including ecology, human rights, economics, political science, and navigation.

International environmental law also engages with global efforts to develop commonly accepted environmental and social standards and to govern major investments in developing countries. These efforts involve lawyers and practitioners in the field of environmental law who help to design and enforce global environmental standards.

While the international bodies that proposed, argued, agreed upon, and ultimately adopted existing international agreements vary according to each agreement, certain conferences and commissions have been particularly important, including the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (1972), the World Commission on Environment and Development (1983), the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer (1987), the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (1992), the World Summit on Sustainable Development (2002), and the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which produced the Copenhagen Accord (2009).

History and Background

Environmental law may be said to have begun in 1306, when England’s King Edward I banned the burning of in London because of the polluting that it produced. Until the late 1960s, most international agreements that aimed at protecting the environment were only narrowly defined. In 1972, the Stockholm Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment paved the way for international agreements that began to promote legislation for the preservation of the environment.

The twentieth century movement known as environmentalism brought about many environmental protection laws at the local, state, national, and international levels. These laws create liabilities for businesses that pollute air, water, or soil or improperly dispose of waste. Legally binding international agreements deal with many types of environmental issues, stretching from terrestrial, freshwater, marine, and atmospheric pollution to the protection of and wilderness. Numerous international principles and rules have emerged since the late twentieth century to challenge many of the established rules and principles in the international legal field. Several multilateral environmental agreements have been adopted, and international environmental rules regulate almost every environmental issue imaginable, including marine pollution, hazardous activities, atmospheric pollution, management, and access to environmental information.

International environmental law in the twenty-first century has focused in particular on such global environmental problems as the depletion of the ozone layer, transboundary movements of hazardous wastes, the conservation of biological diversity, and the international response to climate change. Principles of ecology, conservation, stewardship, responsibility, and sustainability have all influenced modern international environmental law. Numerous international conventions and other agreements set environmental law concerning many issues, including climate change and global warming (the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Copenhagen Accord), sustainable development (the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development), biodiversity (the UN Convention on Biological Diversity), transfrontier pollution (the UN Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Pollution), marine pollution (the UN Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter), (the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES), hazardous materials and activities (the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal), cultural preservation (the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage), (the UN Convention to Combat Desertification), and uses of the seas (the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS).

Global climate change resulting from emissions has become a particularly important issue in international environmental law. The United Nations Climate Change Conference, held in December 2009, produced the Copenhagen Accord, which was drafted by the United States, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa. The resulting arguments and unanswered questions caused the US government to agree only tentatively to the proposal, which was not unanimously and officially adopted by all participating countries. The participating countries drafted a document that emphasizes the importance of climate change as one of the most challenging environmental issues of the twenty-first century. Although not legally binding, the accord asserts that decisive actions should be taken to limit global temperature increases to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). No consensus was reached regarding the reduction of emissions of carbon dioxide—acknowledged by many scientists to be a chief factor in global warming (carbon dioxide is the most important of the “greenhouse gases,” gases that contribute to the atmosphere’s trapping of radiant heat). Although the contents of the Copenhagen Accord have been opposed by many countries and nongovernmental organizations, and many critics of the accord have asserted that it is only a weak version of what is needed to achieve meaningful action on climate change, by January 2010, at least 138 countries had signed the agreement. The Copenhagen Accords set a target of 2020 to reduce emissions. Most of the Group of Seven (G7) countries--Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States,as well as the European Union--were not on track to meet their goals, although some did so when the global COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020 and led to shutdowns that reduced emissions from vehicular traffic and other sources.

In 2015, 196 parties at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, France, signed the Paris Agreement. This legally binding international treaty on climate change sought to slow increases in the global average temperature and keep it below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. To accomplish this goal, greenhouse gas emissions would have to peak before 2025 and decline 43 percent by 2030. Developed countries agreed to help less-developed countries with financial assistance for projects such as acquiring technology to implement changes. In 2020, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement, but following Trump's defeat in the presidential election, President Joe Biden reentered the United States into the agreement in early 2021. When evaluating performance thus far at the 2023 UN Climate Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, analysts concluded it was essential that nations prevent the global average temperature from increasing by 1.5 degrees Celsius.

International Environmental Law Organizations

Around the world, intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations seek to promote the adoption and enforcement of internationally accepted environmental laws. Among these organizations are the following:

• •Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): This panel was established by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme. The goal of the IPCC is to engage in total and objective assessment of all scientific, technical, and socioeconomic information relevant to an understanding of the scientific basis of the risks posed by climate change induced by humans, the potential impacts of such risks, options for to climate change, and ways to reduce the effects of climate change.
• • Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC): This commission, which was created by the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation, a side treaty of North American Free Trade Agreement, addresses regional environmental concerns, helps prevent potential trade and environmental conflicts, and promotes the effective enforcement of environmental laws. Members of the CEC are the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
• •United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP): UNEP was established as the environmental conscience of the United Nations system. It provides an integrative and interactive mechanism through which a large number of separate efforts by intergovernmental, nongovernmental, national, and regional bodies in the service of the environment are reinforced and interrelated.
• •International Maritime Organization (IMO): This organization, which handles marine pollution regulations, is the specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for improving maritime safety and preventing pollution from ships.

Other intergovernmental organizations with interests in international environmental law include the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s World Heritage Center, the European Commission’s Environmental Directorate General, the European Environment Agency, the World Conservation Union, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the World Bank, and the World Meteorological Organization.

The Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) is an example of a nongovermental organization that works to support the creation and enforcement of environmental laws around the world. This public interest nonprofit law firm, which has offices in the United States and Switzerland, is committed to strengthening existing international environmental laws and using international law and institutions to protect the environment, promote human health, and ensure a just and sustainable society. Other examples of nongovernmental organizations that support international environmental law include the International Environmental Law Committee of the American Bar Association (which considers, informs, and engages its members on public international environmental law, such as global, multilateral, regional and bilateral agreements on the environment), Earthjustice (formerly the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund), the EnviroLink Network, the Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide, Greenpeace International, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Friends of the Earth International, Resources for the Future, the World Resources Institute, and the World Wide Fund for Nature.

Controversies

The definition of international environmental law can sometimes generate controversy. Given the broad scope of environmental law, no fully definitive list of environmental laws is possible; the field is made up of a complex of interlocking global, international, national, state, and local treaties, conventions, statutes, regulations, and policies that seek to protect the environment and natural resources affected or endangered by human activities. Together, these instruments attempt to tackle some of the world’s most challenging and controversial environment-related issues, including climate change, pollution, resource conservation, trade policies, management of fisheries, and biodiversity preservation.

Controversy arises from the nexus of these goals and economic priorities: From an economic perspective, environmental law may be understood as concerned with the prevention of present and future environmental problems and the preservation of common resources in order to avoid their exhaustion. The limitations and expenses that international environmental laws may impose on commerce are often discussed in the context of the often immeasurable financial benefits of environmental protection. Where policies to promote long-term but difficult-to-measure environmental priorities conflict with policies that promote short-term economic gains (particularly during economic downturns such as the global recession that began in 2008), persons who are suffering economically often find economic goals more compelling and easier to understand than environmental goals.

The concept of environmental justice is also a source of controversy. The development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies can have disproportionate impacts on particular socioeconomic, ethnic, or national groups of people. Therefore, one of the goals of environmental law must be to clearly define and equitably administer environmental justice for all nations and peoples, by providing each with the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards and equal access to the decision-making process that seeks to provide healthy environmental living conditions.

Among scientists and politicians, debates are ongoing regarding the causes of climate change. It will have significant future impacts on agriculture, sea levels, the spread of disease, the deterioration of polar ice (the world’s “air conditioner”), species (including human) migration, and biological diversity. The challenge is in how to regulate human-induced global warming with minimal interference in the global economy—and how to do so with minimal disproportionate impacts on particular populations. Developing nations argue that developed nations caused the majority of greenhouse gas emissions and should shoulder more of the burden of addressing the issue.

That challenge requires creative and innovative law and policy making at all levels of society. Governments around the world must continue to discuss how best to combat climate change and adapt to its effects. Appropriate international environmental laws must be formulated and enforced if goals for the of negative climate change impacts are to be met. There is a need to gain not only the theoretical but also the proactive support of developing countries for the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, by allowing underprivileged nations their total inputs and helping them to gain an understanding of how to comply with the agreement’s complex or misunderstood provisions.

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