International Environmental Law International Law

International Environmental Law

International law takes multiple different formats. One format is law as determined by the United Nations. Such laws cover all member states, although there are limited enforcement mechanisms. The UN currently has half a dozen bodies that are responsible for the development and codification of international law (United Nations, 2008). These laws have at various times governed environmental issues. For example, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) set up the Convention on Biological Diversity, which among other tasks protects endangered species (CBD, 2009).

Other forms of international law are treaties and multinational agreements. These are agreements negotiated between different countries. The countries involved are then bound by the terms of these treaties. Enforcement mechanisms for these treaties and multilateral agreements are embedded in the treaty and therefore can vary significantly from one treaty to another. These treaties address issues of mutual or regional interest, including the management of share environmental resources.

Nations are bound by the terms of international law. For example, the CBD has the power to list a species as endangered. This restricts trade in such species, and nations have an obligation to uphold these laws, both in their border security and in internal activities. African nations, for example, must enforce protections afforded to ivory-bearing animals under international law. In many cases, nations augment the protections in international law with their own national laws. National laws typically come with greater enforcement power.

When a nation becomes a signatory to a treaty or multilateral agreement, its rights and obligations are defined by the terms of that agreement. The rights and obligations under such treaties are subject to enforcement by other members of the treaty, typically through quasi-judiciary bodies. For example, the International Whaling Commission must obey the limits on whale hunting and trading or face sanction under the terms of the agreement. As the commission expands its mandate to include all aspects of whale conservation, such as ecological considerations and preventative measures, signatories are obligated to follow through on these initiatives, in addition to their original set of obligations (Currie, 2007). A multilateral agreement or treaty does not contain rights or obligations for non-signatory nations.

There are hundreds of international conferences that cover environmental legal issues. The aforementioned International Whaling Commission is one such agreement. The IWC was the culmination of a conference addressing the issue of the declining whaling industry in Washington DC in 1946. The functional purpose of the IWC is to "provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks" (IWC, 2009). Beyond this, however, the IWC was a landmark commission because it addressed the need for conservation of a key global resource that had been threatened by human activity. The recognition of the need for a multilateral agreement with the world's major whaling nations on board was landmark, and paved the way for other agreements in future, such as the near-global ban on the ivory trade.

Another significant conference was the so-called "Earth Summit," in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. This summit resulted was the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and produced non-binding commitments by signatory nations to reduce their output of greenhouse gases.

An ongoing conference is the meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, which is currently meeting in Brazil and will consider the fate of the Atlantic bluefin tuna, whose stocks have become severely depleted in manner similar to the experience of the whaling industry in the early part of the 20th century.

Many agreements have entered into international environmental law. A binding agreement that flowed from the UNFCCC was the Kyoto Protocol, in which industrialized nations signed on to firm commitments with respect to greenhouse gas reduction.

An example of a bilateral agreement in international law is the 1991 U.S.-Canada Air Quality Agreement. This agreement addressed transboundary air pollution, with the negative consequence of causing acid rain in another jurisdiction. Recognizing that air pollution can travel great distances, the agreement was a landmark for its recognition of the multinational nature of pollution and the concept of clean air as a shared global resource (EPA, 2009).