Abstract
International environmental law plays a political role to balance twin critical values of environmental conservation and economic growth by establishing new concepts, legal principles, administrative regulations, soft law, as well as governance strategies. By creating “gentle caps” on states to conserve the environment through wording while imposing as little harm to economic growth as possible, international environmental law is designed to mitigate the political tensions between economic development and environmental conservation. For example, many MEAs do not deny the utilization of natural resources while emphasizing “sustainability” in the situations where the issues arise. Some MEAs accept commercial uses of natural resources to conserve the environment. The compatibility between trade and the environment issues is also addressed by both WTO rules and MEAs for promoting mutual supportiveness rather than conflicts. Various Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) contain their own conceptual terms and legal principles developed in their own contexts. Recent new efforts for their implementations emphasize the necessity to make the most of MEAs by formulating governance strategies containing the elements of MEAs, such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), rather than simply implementing them.
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Notes
- 1.
Strahan and Douglass (2018).
- 2.
Sands (1996), pp. 774–795.
- 3.
Redgwell (2007).
- 4.
Sands (1995), pp. 198–208.
- 5.
Sands, supra note 4, p. 203.
- 6.
Article 5 of World Heritage Convention stipulates as: “To ensure that effective and active measures are taken for the protection, conservation and presentation of the cultural and natural heritage situated on its territory, each State Party to this Convention shall endeavor, in so far as possible, and as appropriate for each country: ….”
- 7.
See, Article 8(i) of Convention on Biological Diversity.
- 8.
See, Article 10 of Convention on Biological Diversity.
- 9.
See, de Klemm et al. (1995), pp. 408–429.
- 10.
CBD’s Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA) reports in 2010 that: “Despite widespread inclusion of sustainable use of biodiversity as an element in national biodiversity strategies and actions plans, as well as in other biodiversity-related national strategies and action plans, unsustainable use in many sectors, notably agriculture, fisheries, forestry and hunting, remains a major cause of biodiversity loss. Effective implementation of Article 10 is hampered for many Parties by a range of obstacles, including: lack of political will and of human and financial capacity, inter alia for the establishment and enforcement of management plans; lack of cross-sectoral integration and coordination; poor operationalization of the definition of sustainable use; lack of understanding and implementation of the concept of adaptive management; difficulties in establishing thresholds and indicators to measure progress, and lack of monitoring capacities; and unsustainable, unauthorized and unregulated activities. …” See, UNEP/CBD/SBSTTA/14/7.
- 11.
Principle 3 of Rio Declaration on Environment and Development.
- 12.
Principle 7 of Rio Declaration on Environment and Development.
- 13.
Benedick (1998), at 241.
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
See, Article 3-1 of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
- 16.
- 17.
Article 10(a) of Kyoto Protocol.
- 18.
Article 1-8 of Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, and also its Article 2 refers to this “Industrial Rationalization.”
- 19.
See, Decision 1/12 D of First Meeting of the Parties to the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.
- 20.
Andersen and Sarma (2002), at 480.
- 21.
The Doha Ministerial Declaration, particularly paragraph 32, recommends the CTE to work on: (i) the effect of environmental measures on market access, especially in relation to developing countries; (ii) the relevant provisions of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs); and (iii) labeling requirements for environmental purposes. See, WT/MIN(01)/DEC/1.
- 22.
FCCC/CP/2007/6/Add.1.
- 23.
World Trade Organization and United Nations Environment Programme (2009), pp. 82–83l.
- 24.
For example, Ad Hoc working group Meeting on Implementing Paris Agreement: Response Measures and Trade, was convened on October 2017 in Geneva, Switzerland. https://unctad.org/en/pages/MeetingDetails.aspx?meetingid=1565, Cited 28 October, 2018.
- 25.
See, Article 6 of Kyoto Protocol and its Article 12 and its Article 17.
- 26.
Further institutional elaborations were made by the climate change treaty regime after 2004. See, Yamin and Depledge (2004), pp. 136–196.
- 27.
Yamin and Depledge supra note 26, p. 138.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
Decision 1/CP.16 of UNFCCC.
- 30.
FCCC/CP/2011/9/Add.1 annexed to Decision 3/CP.17 of UNFCCC.
- 31.
See, Article 6-3 of Paris Agreement.
- 32.
Eighteen countries including Japan and the USA signed the declaration. See, Ministerial Declaration on Carbon Markets.
- 33.
Recent United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals are also soft law developed by United Nations. It contains a wide range of elements as goals and their elaborated targets such as climate change, biological diversity, wetlands, world heritage for global environmental elements, and other development issues such as poverty, access to food, gender, sustainable cities, peace, partnership among others. Multiple actors, such as governments, local municipalities, business enterprises, RINGOs, NGOs among others are participating in the SDGs process. This has significant implications for strengthening the treaty regimes as well as their implementations. See, Kanie and Biermann (2017).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to express special thanks of gratitude to Emeritus Professor Toru Iwama, Seinan Gakuin University, for his valuable comments, advice and encouragements for this research and study as well as Professor Shiro Hori, Fukuoka University, for his deliberate coordination and leadership for the research project on “Effective Climate Change Treaty Regime.”
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Kawamoto, M. (2020). Global Environmental Treaty Regimes as Balancer Between Environmental Conservation and Economic Growth: Facilitating Effective Implementations of Global Environmental Treaty Regimes. In: Hori, S., Takamura, Y., Fujita, T., Kanie, N. (eds) International Development and the Environment. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3594-5_7
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