International Environmental Conventions: Treaties and PYQs

International environmental law is built from a long series of treaties, each aimed at one problem: wetlands, wildlife trade, the ozone layer, hazardous waste, greenhouse gases, biodiversity or mercury. Examiners rarely ask what a treaty says in detail. They ask which subject belongs to which name, in which year it was adopted and in which city it was signed, so the whole chapter is best learned as a set of matched triplets.

The early treaties

The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance was signed in 1971 in the Iranian city of Ramsar and came into force in 1975. It is the oldest of the modern global environmental treaties and the only one devoted to a single ecosystem type. Sites whose ecological character has changed or is likely to change are placed on a list called the Montreux Record, and the second of February is observed as World Wetlands Day. The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment met at Stockholm in June 1972; it was the first world gathering on the environment, the fifth of June is observed as World Environment Day in its memory, and it led to the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme, whose headquarters are at Nairobi in Kenya. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, known as CITES, was agreed at Washington in 1973 and entered into force in 1975; it places species in three appendices according to how strictly their trade must be controlled. The Convention on Migratory Species, also called the Bonn Convention, followed in 1979.

Protecting the ozone layer

The Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer was adopted in 1985 as a framework agreement, and the operative instrument under it is the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, adopted in 1987 and in force from 1989. The protocol set out timetables for phasing out chlorofluorocarbons, halons, carbon tetrachloride and other ozone depleting substances, and it is widely described as the most successful environmental treaty ever concluded because every country in the world became a party to it. The Kigali Amendment of 2016 extended it to hydrofluorocarbons, which do not harm ozone but are powerful greenhouse gases. The sixteenth of September is observed as the International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer.

The Rio Earth Summit and what came from it

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, better known as the Earth Summit, met at Rio de Janeiro in 1992. It produced the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, the non-binding Forest Principles, and Agenda 21, a detailed programme of action for sustainable development in the twenty-first century. Two conventions were opened for signature there. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change came into force in 1994 and meets every year as the Conference of the Parties. The Convention on Biological Diversity also came into force in 1993 and rests on three objectives: conservation of biological diversity, sustainable use of its components, and fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from genetic resources. Its Cartagena Protocol of 2000 governs the safe transfer of living modified organisms, and its Nagoya Protocol of 2010 governs access to genetic resources and benefit sharing.

The climate treaties

The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997 and came into force in 2005. It placed binding greenhouse gas reduction targets on the developed countries listed in Annex I, leaving developing countries without such targets, and created three flexibility mechanisms: the Clean Development Mechanism, Joint Implementation and emissions trading. The Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015 at the twenty-first Conference of the Parties and came into force in 2016. It replaced the top-down structure of Kyoto with Nationally Determined Contributions, in which every country decides and declares its own targets, and set the global goal of holding the rise in average temperature well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels while pursuing efforts to limit it to one and a half degrees.

Chemicals and waste

Related bodies and later summits

Two institutions are asked alongside the treaties. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme to assess the science of climate change; it conducts no research of its own but reviews published work. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, founded in 1948, maintains the Red List of Threatened Species, with categories running from Least Concern through Vulnerable, Endangered and Critically Endangered to Extinct in the Wild and Extinct. The phrase sustainable development, meaning development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, comes from the 1987 report Our Common Future of the World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland. Rio was followed by the World Summit on Sustainable Development at Johannesburg in 2002 and by the Rio plus twenty conference of 2012, which produced the document The Future We Want.