Environment and Natural Resources PDF

ENVIRONMENT AND 11 NATURAL RESOURCES PREVIEW CONTENTS In this chapter, international organizations are focused on the management of the environment and natural resources, The context a challenge tha...

ENVIRONMENT AND 11 NATURAL RESOURCES PREVIEW CONTENTS In this chapter, international organizations are focused on the management of the environment and natural resources, The context a challenge that has deepened in the wake of climate Building a global change and threats to biodiversity. National responses to environmental regime these problems vary in quality and in quantity, reflected in the slowness with which the foundations of a global The United Nations environmental regime were built; it was not until after the Environment Programme 1972 Stockholm conference that the UN Environment Other environmental and Programme (UNEP) was founded, and while there was natural resource IOs progress on addressing acid pollution and threats to the ozone layer, the story on other problems was less positive. Non-state environmental After reviewing achievements in agreeing environmental actors law, the chapter focuses on the structure and goals of UNEP, noting the failure of efforts to create a World Environment Organization. It then discusses the work of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and the varied results in building regimes around forests and energy. On the latter, the work of IOs such as the International Energy Agency (IEA) is reviewed. The chapter ends with an assessment of the work of non-state actors, arguing that environmental INGOs have been a source of pressure on governments and IGOs, and noting the impact of changes in the policies of multinational enterprises. THE CONTEXT In July 2022, delegates to a meeting of the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring that a clean, healthy and sustainable environment should be considered a human right. ‘These resolutions may seem abstract,’ noted UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights and the Environment David Boyd before the vote, ‘but they are a catalyst for action, and they empower ordinary people to hold their governments accountable in a way that is very powerful.’ Perhaps the only surprising quality about 237 238 INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS the resolution was that it had taken so long to agree: more than 70 years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, more than 50 years after an international conference in Stockholm had pushed the environment to the forefront of global governance concerns, and decades into the deepening crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. Of the many issues that have been addressed at the international level, few are more clearly international or global in scope than the state of the environment. Defined simply as the physical surroundings in which all life on earth exists, the environment has been reshaped by human activity for thousands of years, a process that has accelerated since the industrial revolution, creating problems such as air pollution, water pollution, waste and habitat destruction. None of these problems respect national borders and, while they can be addressed to a degree by domestic action on the part of states, there is no prospect of a full or universal resolution without international cooperation. That cooperation, where it happens, must address multiple challenges: A growing human population (crossing the eight billion mark in 2022), with all the increased pressure on natural resources that this involves. A heavy reliance in most parts of the world on pollutive fossil fuels: coal, oil and natural gas. Rises in the levels of airborne chemicals, posing threats to human health. The continued production and careless disposal of waste, including its toxic, hazardous and radioactive forms. Human pressure on biodiversity, leading to countless numbers of species extinctions and pushing other species to the brink of extinction. Environmental policy is not just concerned with qualitative matters such as clean air and water, but also with quantitative matters, prime among them being the management of natural resources. These are materials or commodities found naturally on earth that have value to humans, including land, water, plants, animals, soil, minerals, fossil fuels, forests, fisheries and the open ocean. They can be consumed directly, as in the case of food and drinking water, or indirectly, as in the case of forests that provide timber and fuelwood. Most are local, meaning that they are geographically restricted, with different parts of the world being relatively well or badly endowed, and states usually treating them as a national issue subject to national control. Other resources – including forests and fisheries – have global significance, and are more logically managed through international cooperation. However, resistance by countries such as Brazil to international management of its tropical rain forests, for example, and the problems the international community has had in agreeing shared management of the world’s oceans, show the difficulties faced by efforts to manage shared resources. Above all, human activity has generated the ultimate existential problem of climate change (see Hulme, 2022). At its heart is the greenhouse effect, a natural phenomenon which makes life on earth possible because water vapour, carbon dioxide  11: Environment and natural resources 239 and methane trap enough solar radiation to keep global temperatures stable. Our use of fossil fuels, coupled with intensive farming and the removal of the forests that are natural sinks for many pollutants (notably carbon dioxide or CO2), has resulted in an enhanced greenhouse effect. Higher CO2 concentrations have trapped more solar radiation in the atmosphere, with a host of negative effects: warming temperatures, changing weather patterns, more extreme weather events, melting icecaps and glaciers, rising sea levels and changing crop-growing patterns. The science of the problem has been understood since the late nineteenth century, the first evidence of rising CO2 concentrations was gathered in the 1950s, and political warnings were issued in the late 1980s, but an international treaty on climate change was not agreed until 1992, and even today there are many states that still equivocate on taking action. The extent to which states are prepared to work together in addressing environmental problems depends on a variety of factors, ranging from the degree to which each of them experiences a problem to levels of public awareness, levels of political interest and the influence of domestic industries, notably energy and automobile companies. The states with the strongest records of factoring environmental concerns into politics and economics have been variously described as environmental states, ecological states or green states. Duit et al. (2016) define environmental states as those which possess ‘a significant set of institutions and practices dedicated to the management of the environment and societal– environmental interactions’. The opposite, meanwhile, are those states that possess fewer of these features and are less supportive of global governance on the environment. One of the effects of the differences has been the creation of a leader-laggard dynamic by which leader states pull others behind them to more ambitious standards and goals, while laggard states either follow along later or force compromises that result in more modest goals (Knill et al., 2011). Leader states such as Germany, the UK, the US, and the Nordic countries have long played the most influential role in driving the definition and implementation of environmental policy at the international level, while laggard states – most of them in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia – have been slower to change. The balance has changed in recent decades with the rise of new economic powers, such as China and India, exerting new levels of influence. These changes have combined to complicate the building of a global environmental regime, with states bringing different perspectives to the debate: where many of the environmental problems of the leader states are associated with the long-term effects of industrialization and consumption, many of the laggards are driven by a more complex combination of shorter-term economic change and poverty. The challenges involved are reflected in the results of the Environmental Performance Index, maintained by Yale and Columbia universities. This ranks countries out of 100 according to several performance criteria, such as environmental health, levels of air and water pollution, habitat protection and land use. What it finds is that the countries to which industrialization came first (Western Europe and North America) do best, with scores in the range of 55–80, while the newer industrializing countries (such as the BRICS) and the poorest countries in the world 240 INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS Denmark 1 UK 2 Finland 3 Malta 4 Sweden 5 France 12 Germany 13 Australia 17 Japan 25 USA 43 Canada 49 Mexico 73 Brazil 81 Russia 112 South Africa 116 China 160 Nigeria 162 Indonesia 164 Turkey 172 Vietnam 178 India 180 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 Score out of 100 Figure 11.1: The Environmental Performance Index. Source: Based on data in Environmental Performance Index (2023). Numbers at the end of columns indicate ranking. (mostly in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa) languish in the range of 20–50 (see Figure 11.1). While the leaders show what can be done, and work to encourage improved environmental policies in other parts of the world, the emerging and poorer countries often see environmental regulation as a brake on their economic development that the industrialized countries did not have to face. As if these challenges were not enough, finding agreement on international environmental policy is made harder by the difficulty of separating the environment from many other issues, including the economy, energy, agriculture, transport, health, land use and urban development. This is a reality that states have faced domestically as they have tried to divide responsibility for different areas of policy to different government departments. It has also been a reality at the international level, where multiple international organizations have been active in areas with an environmental dimension, and there have sometimes been difficulties in deciding the divisions of interest and responsibility.  11: Environment and natural resources 241 BUILDING A GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL REGIME Like many other topics in international affairs, the environment has been a relatively recent addition to the agenda of global governance. The states that were earliest to industrialize were the first to experience the most serious effects of air and water pollution, and of habitat destruction. Governments did little to respond, though, giving little thought to the environmental effects of economic policy. As a topic, the environment was on the margins of the agenda of the United Nations, which at first addressed it only so far as it related to food production and the elimination of hunger. When the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) was founded in 1945 to address long-term food supply needs, attention was paid to the protection and extension of forest cover to check soil erosion, protect watersheds, control floods, act as windbreaks and shelter wildlife. Its leaders later realized that resource mismanagement and population growth were standing in the way of a solution to the post-war global food crisis, and it was only then that FAO began to develop an interest in environmental management. (For background on the early years of environmentalism, see McCormick, 1995.) At about the same time, the new UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was interested in the protection of nature, but lacked either the necessary staff or the resources to act. Instead, it helped support the creation in 1947 of a new hybrid body named the International Union for the Protection of Nature, whose members included representatives from governments and from NGOs. It changed its name in 1956 to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), signifying the new idea that nature should not be protected in isolation, but should be planned to be used sustainably. The term conservation (wise use) had been used since the early twentieth century, and was later to evolve into the idea of sustainable development discussed in Chapter 5. Unlike many of the other regimes assessed in this book, science lies at the heart of the environmental regime, changing the dynamic both of how decisions are taken and of the voices that must be heard as those decisions are shaped. The environment has not only been part of the interests of a cluster of IOs with more limited agendas, such as the International Union of Biological Sciences (founded 1919) and the International Council of Scientific Unions (founded 1931), but it has also spawned epistemic communities of experts whose work feeds into that of IOs; see Spotlight 11. It was not until the 1960s that public opinion in the Global North began to pay more attention to the deteriorating state of the environment, and to demand political responses. Science was offering new and alarming evidence of the problem, and there was a change in political and public attitudes with the rise of what Inglehart (1971) described as post-materialism: in distinction to the materialist interest in economic growth and security, there was a new focus on quality-of-life issues such as environmental protection, nuclear disarmament and gender equality. His thesis was that Westerners born after World War II had grown up during a time of unprecedented prosperity and relative international peace, freed from many of the concerns about security and survival that had influenced earlier generations. This combination of affluence, peace and security had led to a ‘silent revolution’ in Western political cultures, in which the 242 INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS SPOTLIGHT 11 EPISTEMIC COMMUNITIES AND THE ENVIRONMENT As we saw in Chapter 1, an epistemic community is a group of experts with recognized skills and knowledge in a particular area who have been drawn together to share and pass on their knowledge. They often play a key role in the work of international organizations, as we will see in Chapter 12 with their contributions to bodies with a scientific or technical focus. Because science is so central to our understanding of environmental problems, these communities have also been a part of international cooperation on a range of such problems. One of the most effective was the community that evolved around the problem of ozone depletion in the 1980s; see later in this chapter. It began with a network of mainly American scientists, then expanded – via UNEP – to include European scientists. They built on the 1985 Vienna Convention to undertake research on ozone depletion, to publish reports and to organize conferences, and to lobby governments for policy change, playing a key role in the adoption of the Montreal Protocol in 1987 (Morin et al., 2020). The most important epistemic community working on environmental issues today is undoubtedly the network of more than 1,300 scientists and other experts from almost every country in the world that contribute to the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This was created in 1988 by UNEP and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to synthesize knowledge and understanding about climate change and to publish periodic reports that could be used to help guide policy. The IPCC – headquartered within the WMO offices in Geneva – does not produce its own research so much as it pulls together the research of others. The first of its reports was published in 1990 and the sixth in 2022. Among them they offer a road map through the changing scientific understanding of climate change, work that earned the IPCC the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize (shared with former US vice president Al Gore). priority given to economic achievement had given way to an increased emphasis on the quality of life: ‘the disciplined, self-denying and achievement-oriented norms of industrial society are giving way to the choices over lifestyle which characterize post- industrial economies’ (Inglehart, 1997). Developments since 1972 A turning point in the story of global environmental governance came in 1972 with the convening in Stockholm, Sweden, of the UN Conference on the Human Environment, usually known simply as the Stockholm conference. This was the first conference at which national governments (113 in all) met to discuss the state of the environment from a global perspective, along with the potential political responses. While the environment until then had meant mainly an interest in the state of nature, and environmental problems had been discussed mainly as a localized matter in industrialized states, the definition of the environment now widened, the perspective  11: Environment and natural resources 243 of emerging states was added to the debate and there was a new emphasis on looking at these problems internationally. Stockholm encouraged the creation of new national environmental protection departments in multiple countries and led to the founding in 1973 of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). (For background, see Morin et al., 2020.) Citizen initiatives also played a key role at Stockholm, with the work of national environmental interest groups being reinforced by the work of newer INGOs, including the World Wildlife Fund (founded 1961), Friends of the Earth (1969) and Greenpeace (1971). The first of these initially had the older and narrower interest in nature, but both Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace took a broader view that included concerns about pollution, deforestation, commercial whaling, the overuse of natural resources, climate change, and even the links between environmental damage and human rights; see later in this chapter for more details. The environment was proving to be a distinctive issue of international cooperation not only because it had spawned a global social movement, but also because it began to spark the creation of political parties based on environmental concerns. Green parties were formed in multiple parts of the Global North, and went on to be members of coalition governments in several countries, including Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland and New Zealand. At first considered to be radical outsiders, the greens later entered mainstream politics, evolving from single- issue environmentalists into more broadly,based political parties (McBride, 2022). As such, they changed the perspectives of domestic politics, their influence spilling over into the way governments have approached environmental issues at the international level and offering a new set of theoretical approaches to understanding international organizations; see IOs in Theory 11. The importance of the revised post-Stockholm approach to the environment – and specifically its new emphasis on international cooperation – was illustrated by the responses to two major environmental problems. The first was the worsening in North America and Europe of acid pollution, created when emissions of sulphur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides from power plants and road vehicles react with atmospheric water vapour to increase the acidity of rain, snow and fog. This, in turn, caused dieback in forests, undermined the ecosystems of rivers and lakes, eroded buildings and monuments, and harmed human health. Under the auspices of the UN Economic Commission for Europe, which included members from Eastern and Western Europe, the Convention on Long- Range Transboundary Air Pollution was signed in 1979, committing signatories to work to limit air pollution. Later, the European Community (forerunner to today’s European Union (EU)) agreed a 1988 directive on emissions from large combustion plants (such as power stations). As a result of the two agreements, emissions of SO2 – after growing steadily since 1900 and peaking in 1970 – fell in Europe between 1990 and 2015 by 74 per cent and in North America by 61 per cent; see Figure 11.2. The 1979 convention, however, applied only to Europe and North America; while the air in these two regions is much cleaner, in two other parts of the world the story is not so hopeful: emissions of SO2 in East Asia (mainly China) grew by 66 per cent before tailing off and in India they grew by 300 per cent. 244 INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS IO s IN THEORY 11 ENVIRONMENTALISM AND GREEN THEORY Environmentalism is a term that is used interchangeably to describe a theory, a philosophy or an ideology that promotes deeper understanding of the threats posed to the environment by human activity, and of the means to developing improved management and protection (Peterson del Mar, 2012). It supports a view of the world shaped by the argument that humans are ethically responsible for Earth’s ecological integrity, and that efforts are needed to rebalance the relationship between humans and their environment. These efforts include changes in individual behaviour, but environmentalism is also an example of a social movement: one emerging from society and aimed at pursuing broad goals, by orthodox and/or unorthodox means, usually driven by traditional outsiders challenging existing elites, and seeking to change public policy without becoming part of government. In this sense, environmentalism is usually – if not entirely accurately – equated with activism. As a social movement, environmentalism seeks political and economic change, but there are competing views about how this can be achieved, ranging from change within the existing capitalist system to an entire rejection of that system. It has become usual, for example, to distinguish between reformist and radical environmentalism. The former supports human- centred change within existing political, economic and social structures, while the latter argues that we face urgent dangers that cannot be resolved within existing structures, and that we need fundamental change and entirely new approaches to both economic growth and environmental protection. The recent and related rise of green theory ties into the growing popularity of green politics in many countries, based on a desire to build sustainable societies rooted in ecological wisdom, social justice, non-violence, diversity and grassroots democracy, overlapping with the views of feminists and peace activists. Green theory is used to look at the role of international organizations in either promoting or hindering efforts to address environmental problems, and also spills over into studies of the greening of IGOs dealing with trade, finance and development. The second problem concerned damage caused to the Earth’s ozone layer by synthetic chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in refrigerants and aerosol accelerants. Stratospheric ozone helps screen out ultraviolet radiation from the sun, elevated levels of which can cause increased incidence of skin cancer and eye disorders, kill micro-organisms and cells in animals and plants, damage seed quality and reduce crop yields. Research in the 1970s revealed that CFCs were thinning the ozone layer, particularly over the polar icecaps. In 1977, the World Meteorological Organization (see Chapter 12) took the lead in publishing a plan of action. In the face of opposition from industry, the US took action to limit the release of CFCs, and the European Community followed suit. In 1985, the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer was signed, and given more teeth and tighter targets in 1987 with the signature of the Montreal Protocol to the convention. By 1998, these actions had  11: Environment and natural resources 245 80 70 Million metric tonnes 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 East Asia Europe India North America Figure 11.2: Sulphur dioxide emissions. Source: Based on data in Aas et al. (2019). helped cut the global annual production of ozone-depleting substances by as much as 80–90 per cent. Although these two examples showed that it was possible to identify a problem, and for IOs to help develop – and implement – a response, numerous challenges remain. The debate was given new focus by the convening of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro, and usually known as the Rio Earth Summit. The goal was to give new momentum to the changes begun 20 years before at Stockholm, but while the conference resulted in the signature of new treaties on climate change and biological diversity, not much else was achieved. Two later conferences – the 2002 Johannesburg Earth Summit (otherwise known as Rio+10) and the 2012 Rio Earth Summit (Rio+20) – were even more disappointing. By the time that delegates to the 2022 UN General Assembly meeting adopted their resolution on a clean, healthy and sustainable environment being a human right, it was evident that the global environmental picture was mixed at best, with new threats posed by climate change, the loss of tropical rain forests and the degradation of reefs. International environmental law If the achievements of global governance on the environment could be measured by the sheer size of the body of international law, then the results are impressive. According to one database (Mitchell, 2022), there are about 3,750 treaties dealing with environmental topics: more than 2,200 bilateral agreements, about 1,300 multilateral agreements and nearly 250 other types of agreements, including protocols. They range in scope from the targeted (including the protection of whales, mangrove management and limits on fishing for Atlantic tuna) to the universal (including climate change and protection of biological diversity). The database maintained by Mitchell lists numerous 246 INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS IOs involved in managing these treaties, including the African Union, the European Forest Institute, the Indian Ocean Fishery Commission, the International Maritime Organization, the Mekong River Commission and the International Seabed Authority. Quantity, though, is not enough, and the achievements of global governance must be measured by the quality of the achievements, which are variable. The treaties listed in Table 11.1 are those that have attracted the most political attention and have been highest up the agenda of global governance, but in almost every case – from marine pollution to biological diversity and climate change – much still remains to be done. Most notably, a division has developed in the approaches of Northern and Southern states. The latter often argue that the North developed its wealth on the back of all but uncontrolled industrialization and exploitation of natural resources, and that the South should not be handicapped by regulation, or that it should be compensated for the costs of regulation. This argument was at the heart of discussions in 2022 about climate change, resulting in an agreement at the meeting of parties to the climate change convention to provide ‘loss and damage’ funding to compensate the states most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Table 11.1: Major environmental treaties Opened for Where signed Subject signature 1946 Washington DC, Regulation of Whaling USA 1971 Ramsar, Iran Wetlands of International Importance, Especially as Waterfowl Habitat 1972 London, UK Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping Wastes and Other Matter 1973 Washington DC International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna 1979 Geneva, Switzerland Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution 1979 Bonn, Germany Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals 1980 Canberra, Australia Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources 1985 Vienna, Austria Protection of the Ozone Layer 1989 Basel, Switzerland Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal 1992 Rio de Janeiro, Biological Diversity Brazil 1992 Rio de Janeiro Climate Change  11: Environment and natural resources 247 THE UNITED NATIONS ENVIRONMENT PROGRAMME Plastics have long been a ubiquitous part of human life; we use them in packaging, building, textiles, consumer products, transport and electronics. While their utility is unquestioned, though, the extent to which we use them and then dispose of them without much care or thought has created a massive global waste problem. Noting that about 400 million tonnes of plastics are produced annually around the world, and that about seven billion tonnes of the plastics produced between 1950 and 2017 had become waste, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2018 launched a New Plastics Economy Global Commitment aimed at encouraging governments and industries to agree a life-cycle approach to plastics. This would involve more careful design and manufacture of plastics, and more active recycling and reuse of plastic waste. UNEP estimated that a shift to this new circular approach could cut the volume of plastics dumped into the world’s oceans by more than 80 per cent, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent and create 700,000 new jobs. It is initiatives such as this that mark out the work of UNEP (pronounced You- nep), the primary IGO with a focus on the environment. Created in 1973 as a result of the Stockholm conference, UNEP has a charge to ‘provide leadership and encourage partnership in caring for the environment by inspiring, informing, and enabling nations and peoples to improve their quality of life without compromising that of future generations’ (United Nations Environment Programme, 2023a). It does this primarily through monitoring environmental trends, encouraging and supporting research, developing and sometimes managing international treaties, hosting environmental conferences, and promoting education and public information. It has a particular interest in climate change, environmental disasters, ecosystem management and improving environmental governance. Despite the size and challenge of international and global approaches to the environment, UNEP is constitutionally weak. It is not a specialized agency of the UN in the same mould as the Food and Agriculture Organization or the World Health Organization, but is instead a programme that has few powers, a huge constituency (the entire world), and limited finances. As a programme, it lacks the status or independence of older and larger UN agencies, and is instead subsidiary to the UN General Assembly. It has had to involve itself in many different activities, and has often had to take action based more on opportunity than on any carefully considered long-term plans. It also has no power to involve itself directly in the domestic affairs of states, and has had limited opportunities for encouraging national governments to agree domestic or regional environmental policies. Its structure is as follows: Secretariat and executive head. Headquartered in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, UNEP is headed by an Executive Office that includes the Executive Director, who is nominated by the UN Secretary General and elected to four-year renewable terms by the General Assembly of the UN. Underlining the connections between UNEP and environmental INGOs, two of the eight executive directors to date – Achim Steiner of Brazil and Inger Andersen of Denmark – served as directors general of IUCN (see later in this chapter) before moving to UNEP. 248 INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS Assembly. UNEP initially had a Governing Council consisting of 58 member states, but this was replaced in 2012 with an Environment Assembly designed to engage all 193 UN member states more directly in UNEP decision-making. The Assembly is the governing body of UNEP, and meets every two years to review progress and set priorities. Executive council. Between meetings of the Assembly, UNEP is overseen by a 118-member Committee of Permanent Representatives, which meets quarterly to develop advice and the agenda for the Assembly. Meanwhile, the UNEP Secretariat of Governing Bodies supports the work of its governing bodies, and includes a Civil Society Unit designed to manage links between UNEP and NGOs. Other elements. UNEP has seven divisions addressing topics such as communication, law and science, six regional offices, 14 sub-regional or country offices, and divides its interests into topics ranging from biosafety to energy, forests and regional seas; see IOs in Action 11. UNEP is also home to the secretariats of 15 international treaties, including the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Migratory Species Convention and the Ozone Layer Convention. Budget. Like many UN bodies, UNEP must rely on voluntary contributions rather than regular and mandatory contributions from UN member states. It must do its work with a staff of about 950 people and an annual income in 2022 of just over $500 million (United Nations Environment Programme, 2023b). Writing in 2010, Ivanova concluded that there was no consensus on UNEP’s performance over its first four decades, with views ranging from praise for its having achieved a great deal with few resources to criticism for its having been weak and ineffective. Twelve years later, in UNEP’s fiftieth anniversary year, Ivanova (2021) concluded that UNEP still remained unknown to many, was often misunderstood, and was often unfairly thought of as a ‘lifeless bureaucracy’. She described it instead as an ‘anchor institution’ for the global environment, in the sense that it played an integral role in global environmental governance, functioning as a hub that provided expertise, leadership, capacity and connectivity. It was never intended, she continued, to be a service organization that would conduct specific environmental activities on its own, but was instead intended to be an advocate that would create reactions in other organizations, notably the family of UN agencies. UNEP’s difficulties once sparked suggestions – spearheaded by France, Germany and the EU – (see Biermann, 2000, and Biermann and Bauer, 2005) that it should be transformed into a specialized agency of the UN: a World Environment Organization with more autonomy, an international legal personality, a stronger voice in UN environmental affairs and a budget based on mandatory contributions from its members rather than voluntary contributions. Ivanova (2012) was not convinced of this logic, arguing that UNEP’s shortcomings were related less to its institutional form than to the barriers that UNEP faced in fulfilling its mission. Rather than wholesale structural change, she concluded, it would be ‘bolder and more effective, and also more feasible, to focus instead on empowering UNEP to properly fulfil its original, visionary mandate’.  11: Environment and natural resources 249 IO s IN ACTION 11 THE UN ENVIRONMENT PROGRAMME AND REGIONAL SEAS One of UNEP’s major successes has been its Regional Seas Programme (RSP), which identifies key regional seas around the world and then brings together neighbouring countries to cooperate in their management. As we saw in Chapter 3, the advantage of regional approaches is that they include smaller numbers of countries, each of which has a more direct and immediate vested interest in resolving a problem. The first RSP was launched in 1975 to focus on the Mediterranean, which was heavily polluted at the time, and it was followed by programmes that included those focused on the Caribbean, the Black Sea, the Red Sea and the Baltic. So successful was the initial Mediterranean Action Plan that there are now 18 regional seas plans and conventions, involving 146 countries (Mead, 2021). UNEP administers seven of them, while the rest are independently administered, with or without input from UNEP. The plans have multiple targets, including the control of pollution, the control of litter and waste, the creation of protected marine areas and the protection of coral reefs. One assessment of the programme (Mead, 2021) describes the agreements involved as the ‘crown jewels of environmental diplomacy’, arguing the advantages of the regional approach, but also noting the differences in the degree of political will, the amount of funding available and the strength of enforcement mechanisms. Even though the Mediterranean programme is the oldest, and hailed as one of the most effective, the sea is still blighted by pollution from microplastics (plastic waste broken down by water, wind and sunlight into pellets and granules). With about 150 million people living on its often densely populated shores, a popular tourist industry, intensive navigation and variable waste water treatment facilities, waste and litter remain critical problems in the Mediterranean. One study (Cincinelli et al., 2019) estimates that about 100,000 tons of plastics still find their way into the sea every year. UNEP also faces the unusual challenge of being a UN body that is not headquartered either in Europe or North America. A deliberate decision was taken during the debates about its creation in 1972 to base it outside the usual centres of power, part of the hope being that this would help encourage support for its work by developing countries doubtful about the benefits of environmental planning. Several wealthier countries argued that, given its coordinating role, it should be sited closer to existing UN agencies, but Nairobi was ultimately chosen. Only one other UN body – the Human Settlements Programme UN-HABITAT – is based outside Europe and North America, and happens also to be in Nairobi. At first, siting UNEP in Nairobi did not lead to the degree of input into environmental governance once envisaged, while travel to Kenya from other developing countries proved difficult and expensive, and the instability and corruption suffered by Kenya has not made it an attractive duty station for potential employees (Ivanova, 2021). Changes in technology, though, have made its distance from the centres of power less problematic: video conferencing has made travel to its headquarters less 250 INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS necessary, and the internet has meant instant communication of the kind that was only dreamed of in the 1970s and 1980s. There is still little sign, though, that the siting of UNEP in Nairobi has led to any broader effort for the headquarters of IGOs to be located anywhere other than in their usual locations in Europe and North America. OTHER ENVIRONMENTAL AND NATURAL RESOURCE IOs There are three IOs with an environmental/natural resource focus that provide different insights into the way that governments have approached these topics. The first of these, which is also the newest, is the Global Environment Facility (GEF), which was founded in 1991, just before the first Rio Earth Summit. The GEF is an independent IO that is best described as a trust fund to help developing countries meet their commitments to several international environmental agreements (including those on climate change, desertification and biological diversity) (Martinez-Diaz and Thwaites, 2018). Based in Washington DC, its members include states, IGOs, NGOs, development banks and corporations. It has an Assembly that brings national government ministers together every three to four years to review policies, refill the trust fund, and negotiate packages of policy measures. It has a 32-member Council with a mix of members from developed and developing countries that meets twice annually, and a Chief Executive Officer appointed by the Council for a maximum of two four-year terms. Although the GEF has 184 member states, most of the funding – nearly $25 billion as of 2022 – has so far come from about 40 national donors, including most of Europe, along with Japan, Mexico, the US and the four BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China). There was early concern (Streck, 2001) that the GEF did not have enough private sector investment, and that it suffered the problem of power asymmetries common to many IOs, but it was also predicted that it was flexible enough to adapt to changing needs, and had the advantage of the strong participatory element that came from close cooperation with NGOs. The questions about private sector investment continued to be asked several years later, along with questions about whether the GEF had worked out a sensible division of labour with its peer institutions (Martinez-Diaz and Thwaites, 2018). For Morin et al. (2020), the work of the GEF has been a compromise between the wishes of developed countries to have a structure such as the World Bank (favouring efficiency and decisions driven by how much each country contributes), and the wishes of developing countries, NGOs and UN agencies (favouring UN values such as transparency, democracy and universality). Meanwhile, another effective regional approach to environmental governance has been pursued by the EU. Although its original priorities – as we saw in Chapter 3 – were economic, including the building of a single market, its leaders soon found that in order to achieve this, multiple unexpected barriers to trade had to be removed. Among these barriers were different environmental standards and regulations that made it harder to sell goods and services across borders. By the late 1970s, the European Community (precursor to the EU) had begun agreeing and adopting new environmental laws, and developing Environmental Action Programmes that  11: Environment and natural resources 251 contained an expanding and increasingly ambitious set of goals. The EU has since adopted a wide range of laws on waste, air and water quality, chemicals, biodiversity, climate change, pesticides, genetically modified organisms and even noise pollution. Such was the strength of the logic behind developing these shared approaches that domestic environmental policy in the member states of the EU has long been driven more by requirements set jointly at the EU level than individually at the level of member states. (For more details, see Jordan and Gravey, 2021.) This has been particularly important for those poorer and newer Eastern European member states that lacked much in the way of environmental laws or policies before joining the EU. The consequences also reach outside the EU: as the world’s wealthiest marketplace, with a population of about 450 million people, the EU has come to have what Bradford (2020) describes as ‘the Brussels effect’ (a reference to the city that is the home of the major EU institutions). She describes this as the EU’s ‘unilateral power to regulate global markets’, which it does not coercively or through IGOs, but instead through market forces as EU corporations extend the impact of EU policy globally. The EU policy on chemicals, for example, is the most stringent such scheme in the world, imposing obligations not just on EU member states but also on states wishing to trade with the EU (including the US). The EU has also been a global leader in responses to climate change, the protection of biodiversity and sustainable development (Eritja, 2021). A third IO with an environmental focus, and which is an unusual blend of governmental and non-governmental members, is the Swiss-based International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Founded in 1948, IUCN has more than 1,400 members, including government agencies and NGOs, as well as being one of a select group of IOs that has permanent observer status at the UN General Assembly. From its headquarters in Gland, Switzerland, it works to influence governments through the collection and analysis of information, supports field research and education, and has played a key role in developing several international treaties, including those on wetlands, biological diversity and trade in endangered species of wildlife. It also maintains the world’s most authoritative source on the status of endangered species, the Red List of Threatened Species. A key role in global environmental governance is played by treaty secretariats (see Table 11.2, and IOs in Action 1), although opinion is divided on how well they are performing. In her assessment of their influence, Jinnah (2014) concludes that they have had the most impact when the states involved do not have strong preferences on the issue at hand, or when there are no international organizations that can better manage a particular treaty. In the case of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), for example, she argues that state preferences were weak to begin with, that no other organization could better manage the treaty than the CBD secretariat, and hence the secretariat has enjoyed a high degree of independence. By contrast, agreements dealing with fisheries have come up against states with strong preferences about how commercially important fish stocks should be managed, while the secretariat for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species has faced strong organizational competition from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN. 252 INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS Table 11.2: Environmental treaty secretariats: Examples Treaty Secretariat location Convention on Biological Diversity Montreal, Canada UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Bonn, Germany Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer UNEP, Nairobi, Kenya Convention on International Trade in Endangered UNEP, Geneva, Switzerland Species Convention on the Control of Transboundary Châtelaine, Switzerland Movements of Hazardous Wastes Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution International Maritime by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter Organization, London, UK Natural resource regimes Forests offer not only an example of a natural resource with a more targeted global governance regime, but also one that has had limited success. The value of forests is clear: they not only serve essential ecological functions as natural habitat, carbon sinks, producers of oxygen, managers of water supply, and generators of clouds and rain, but they are a renewable source of timber for construction and fuelwood (see Nikolakis and Innes, 2020). Despite this, mismanagement and overuse have combined to reduce the proportion of the world’s land surface that is covered by forest from about 45 per cent in the pre-industrial era to just over 30 per cent today. Efforts to draft a global convention on forests in time for the 1992 Rio Earth Summit ended when it became obvious that governments were far from reaching a consensus on its potential content and goals, with a clear North–South split (Bass and Guéneau, 2005): most Northern states wanted forests to be considered a global resource, and thus subject to the protection of a convention, but the US was opposed, prompted by the influence of its domestic timber industry. Meanwhile, most Southern countries – notably big forest states such as Brazil, India and Malaysia – argued that forests were a national resource and were concerned about the potential effect of an agreement on their sovereignty (Humphreys, 2005). As a result, plans for a convention failed, and the status of forests varies from one part of the world to another: while the EU has built a successful reforestation programme that has expanded the area under forest, tropical forests in most of sub-Saharan Africa face the quadruple threats of growing population, the unregulated removal of trees for fuel, logging to meet growing demand from China, and new demands for access from mining, oil and gas companies. Given the critical role of energy in global affairs, and the unequal distribution of sources of energy, it might be expected that there would be a global energy regime, but  11: Environment and natural resources 253 there is not. This is for the simple reason that the major producers of energy – such as China, the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Canada and India – prefer as far as possible to control their own energy resources and to make their own decisions on energy policy (many of which are actually shaped by energy industries and corporations rather than governments). There is clearly an international trade dynamic at work when it comes to importing states working with their suppliers, and the case of OPEC (Chapter 6) is the clearest illustration of that dynamic. Trade in energy is also high on the agenda of the World Trade Organization. Beyond that, though, energy is the subject of a complex array of interests, involving governments, state-owned energy companies (notably in China), private corporations, producers, consumers, market forces, the different dynamics of different fossil fuels and renewable sources of energy, and debates that are often deeply politically charged. States come to the conversations with quite different priorities, resources and policies, and the work of energy IOs is often focused less on making policy than on providing the knowledge needed to help inform that policy. The oldest IO dealing with energy issues is the World Energy Council. It was founded in London in 1924 as the World Power Conference, a gathering of experts brought together to discuss trends in energy use. Its name was changed to the World Energy Council in 1989, and as a UN-accredited body it brings together more than 3,000 member organizations from nearly 90 countries. Representatives from governments, multinationals, academia and NGOs meet every three years in the World Energy Congress to share ideas and information on energy, and the Council publishes regular reports on energy security. The International Energy Agency (IEA) is an autonomous IGO whose origins date back to the energy crisis of the early 1970s. Set up under the framework of the OECD (see Chapter 6), it has 31 mainly European and North American member states, and its task is to accumulate and manage data on global energy as a basis for making recommendations on energy policy. It also coordinates the use of the oil reserves held by its members, as well as encouraging the use of renewable sources of energy and promoting efforts to address climate change. Based in Paris, it is headed by an Executive Director appointed for renewable four-year terms, its main decision- making body is a 31-member Governing Board that meets at least three times annually, and it also convenes biennial conferences of the energy ministers of its member states, and has multiple standing groups and committees with interests in focused parts of the energy debate. It publishes an annual World Energy Outlook that is the authoritative source on global energy use and projections for future developments, and also publishes a wide range of more focused studies of the markets in different sources of energy. In 2021 it published Net Zero by 2050, which outlined the changes that needed to be made globally to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. The International Energy Forum (IEF) is an IGO with 72 member states that describes itself as ‘the global home of energy dialogue’. Much as the International Energy Agency was a product of the 1970s energy crisis, the IEF was a product of the oil supply disruptions that came in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War. Designed as a forum in which energy ministers from producing and consuming states can meet (along with executives from the energy industry), it has a mandate to review energy 254 INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS in the broadest definition of the term. Headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, it has a Secretary General and a 30-member Executive Board with 22 permanent members and eight rotating members, and a permanent secretariat. NON-STATE ENVIRONMENTAL ACTORS The slowness of states to take the initiative on environmental or resource management issues, or to create international organizations whose primary focus was the environment, is reflected in the long history of non-state action in this area. National NGOs have a history dating back to the nineteenth century, and the creation of, for example, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (UK, founded 1889), Naturschutzbund Deutschland (Germany, 1899), the Sierra Club (US, 1892) and the Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature (1914). A similar dynamic can be found at the international level: several INGOs pre-dated the creation of IGOs, including the International Committee for Bird Protection (founded in London in 1922), the International Union for the Protection of Nature (created in 1948) and the World Wildlife Fund (created 1961). Exactly how many environmental INGOs are now in existence is hard to say, for the same reasons that explain the difficulties in counting INGOs generally: the lack of comprehensive data and of an agreed definition of what constitutes an INGO. The best guess is that the numbers probably run into the hundreds because of the long history of non-governmental action on the environment; some examples of INGOs are listed in Table 11.3. They include bodies founded in one country that have opened office in others, coordinating bodies made up of delegations from participating national and local NGOs, and bodies that might be situated in a single country but that have global interests and activities. There are also federations that act as conduits for contacts between NGOs and an IGO. One example of the latter is the Environment Liaison Centre International, an NGO network based in Nairobi. Set up in 1974, it acts as a conduit between the UNEP Environment Assembly and its NGO members. NGOs are also part of the decision-making structure of the Global Environment Facility, with ten seats on the 32-member GEF Council. The work of environmental INGOs has been less deeply studied and noticed than that of IGOs, but there have been two roles in which they have been particularly effective: as information brokers and as whistle-blowers. For example, discussions leading to many international environmental treaties have been heavily influenced by research generated by INGOs, and by INGO influence over media coverage of treaty negotiations. Only national governments can actually take decisions on treaties, and INGOs usually have only observer status at meetings, but they can – with care – alter the direction of the negotiations through the perspectives they provide, which can change both the negotiating process and the results (Corell and Betsill, 2008). In their study of the influence of indigenous peoples and local community delegates on negotiations at the 10th Conference of Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2010, Witter et al. (2015) concluded that non-state delegates achieved ‘moments of influence’ by ‘sounding an alarm, for shaming, and aligning with state  11: Environment and natural resources 255 Table 11.3: Environmental INGOs: Examples Name Founded Headquarters Interests Birdlife 1922 Cambridge, UK Protection of birds and their natural habitats. National International ‘partner’ organizations in nearly 120 countries or territories. World Wide 1961 Switzerland Protection of endangered species and habitats. Fund for International office coordinates work of national Nature offices in nearly 70 countries. Friends of 1969 Amsterdam, the Focus on climate change, economic justice, ‘food the Earth Netherlands sovereignty’, forests and diversity. International office and 75 national groups. Greenpeace 1971 Amsterdam Direct action to stop environmental degradation. International office and 30 national/regional groups. World 1982 Washington Climate, energy, food, forests, water, and cities and Resources DC, USA transport. Think-tank with offices in Brazil, China, EU, Institute India, Indonesia and US. Green Cross 1993 Geneva, Poverty, security and the environment. Founded by International Switzerland former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. International office and 27 national offices. African 1996 Thika, Kenya Seeking African solutions to Africa’s environmental Biodiversity problems. 36 partners in 12 countries. Network actors’. As whistle-blowers, meanwhile, INGOs have used their media contacts and membership lists to draw attention to failures on the part of states to live up to their obligations, and to help treaty secretariats keep track of implementation. There are no environmental INGOs that have had the same clear influence over environmental governance as, for example, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have had on human rights issues, but two offer useful cases of the problems and possibilities of environmental INGOs. The first, which is also one of the oldest, is the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), founded in 1961. Originally called the World Wildlife Fund, it changed its name in 1985 (except in the US and Canada) (while keeping the same acronym) in order to recast itself as a body interested in the whole natural environment, rather than simply wildlife. Its main goal has been to raise funds to spend on nature protection, research, the management of protected areas and encouraging sustainable practices by corporations. Its international office is in Gland, near Geneva, and it has national offices in about 50 countries, and claims a membership of 1.2 million people (World Wide Fund for Nature, 2023). 256 INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS Greenpeace offers a contrast, opting for what it describes on its web site as ‘non-violent creative action’ to draw public attention to environmental problems more broadly. Founded in Canada in 1971, it has a looser structure than most INGOs: it has an international office in Amsterdam, through which the work of 26 independent regional offices is coordinated. In order to maintain its independence, it does not accept government or corporate funding, instead relying on its more than three million members, foundation grants and several thousand volunteers for support. It is opposed to nuclear power, has called out corporations that it accuses of being complicit in deforestation, has a long history of campaigning against commercial whaling, is critical of genetically modified organisms (a position that attracted criticism from scientists), has drawn attention to the problems of toxic waste and deep-sea mining, and has been visible in campaigning on climate change. When it comes to forest policy, NGOs have been on the margins of decision- making, given the attitude of those governments more interested in the utilitarian value of wood and wood products than in the environmental value of forests. Even so, several INGOs have been active on forest science and management, including the following: The International Union of Forest Research Organizations (based in Vienna) was founded in 1892 and networks scientists from several hundred member organizations. The Global Forest Coalition (headquartered in Asunción, Paraguay) brings together interest groups and indigenous people’s organizations working on behalf of people dependent on forests. The Forest Stewardship Council (based in Bonn, Germany) runs a certification and labelling scheme for forest products. The Rainforest Action Network (based in San Francisco) focuses on changing the policies of corporations and consumers through direct action, including consumer boycotts. Although the science of forests is well understood, as is their ecological value, they remain under threat in most parts of the world. This is one problem – as we saw earlier in the chapter – where international cooperation has made minimal headway. Multinationals and the environment For their part, multinational enterprises (MNEs) play a core role in shaping environmental and natural resource policy at both the national and the international level. Not only can they influence the content of international treaties and help determine the degree of support given to those treaties by their home governments, but also they lead the way in exploiting natural resources such as oil and timber, and are the inventors of new products and technology that have key implications for  11: Environment and natural resources 257 environmental policy. The development of batteries for electric and hybrid vehicles, for example, has come more from MNEs than from governments. The fact that so many of the biggest MNEs are based in Europe, North America and China also has a role in explaining their priorities and thinking, leaving most emerging states at a relative disadvantage in global governance. At first glance, the environmental role of MNEs is controversial at best, and negative at worst. The conventional view is that they place profits above environmental concerns, and exploit differences in national environmental standards by closing down operations in countries with tighter regulations and moving them to those with looser restrictions, as well as lower wages. They are also often deeply implicated in tendencies in poorer countries to exploit natural resources unsustainably, as in the case of multinational oil companies such as Shell and their environmentally harmful extraction of oil in Nigeria (Hennchen, 2022). On the other hand, there is evidence that MNEs have not been unaffected by consumer demand that they adopt more sustainable policies, and many have self- regulated by adopting environmental policies and performance standards that exceed those of national governments. An example is offered by the work of the Business Council for Sustainable Development, founded in 1991 to represent business at the Rio Earth Summit. Its leader Stephan Schmidheiny recruited 48 chief executive officers from around the world, and promoted the idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by arguing that companies should meet their ethical, social and environmental responsibilities towards society (Wickert and Risi, 2019). (The name was changed in 1995 to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and it now has more than 200 corporate members, and a headquarters in Geneva.) As an idea, CSR dates back to the 1950s (see Bowen, 1953), and is not restricted to environmental matters (it also includes attitudes towards working conditions, gender and racial equity, and human rights, for example), but Schmidheiny brought it into the environmental realm by speaking of ‘eco-efficiency’. This implies that companies can cut costs through reducing energy inputs and waste, for example, while building greener records that could help attract customers and create new markets (Schmidheiny, 1992). Many businesses have since made significant efforts to change their practices and to capitalize on claims of their new environmental sensitivity, often using it as a positive marketing tool. Critics, though, are less convinced of such claims, and point to numerous examples of MNEs being linked to visible and substantial environmental degradation, whether in the form of pollution or the over-use of resources. Nonetheless, consumers, shareholders and local communities have increasingly expected assurances that goods and services meet minimum standards of environmental responsibility, and many corporations and business sectors have accordingly created codes of conduct, certification schemes and other means of promoting voluntary environmental practices. Among them is the ISO I4001 standard created in 1996 by the International Organization for Standardization (founded in 1947, and based in Geneva), which sets standards aimed at improving environmental management, environmental auditing and environmental labelling. 258 INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS THINKING POINTS What do the results of international cooperation on acid pollution and the ozone layer tell us about the prospects for such cooperation on climate change? How far can the model of epistemic communities such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change be applied to addressing other international challenges? Should UNEP be converted into a World Environment Organization, or at least into a full agency of the UN? Are the barriers to the development of natural resource regimes insurmountable? Is corporate social responsibility a convincing and practical way forward on environmental needs? IOs RELATED TO THIS CHAPTER Environment Liaison Centre International (ELCI) Global Environment Facility (GEF) Greenpeace Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) International Energy Agency (IEA) International Energy Forum (IEF) International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) World Energy Council (WED) World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) FURTHER READING Axelrod, Regina S., and Stacy D. Vandeveer (eds) (2020) The Global Environment: Institutions, Law, and Policy, 5th edn (SAGE). An edited textbook collection of chapters on the major international environmental actors and institutions, including cases of different areas of policy. Harris, Paul G. (ed.) (2022) Routledge Handbook of Global Environmental Politics, 2nd edn (Routledge). An edited collection of chapters on the study of global environmental politics, and the key institutions, actors, ideas and themes involved. Ivanova, Maria (2021) The Untold Story of the World’s Leading Environmental Institution: UNEP at Fifty (MIT Press). A thorough survey of UNEP, including its origins, its structure, its priorities, its leadership and the challenges it continues to face.  11: Environment and natural resources 259 Morin, Jean-Frédéric, Amandine Orsini, and Sikina Jinnah (2020) Global Environmental Politics (Oxford University Press). A review of the nature of global environmental politics, including chapters on the key issues involved, the role of states, the major international organizations and the key non-state actors. Rasche, Andreas, Mette Morsing, and Jeremy Moon (2017) Corporate Social Responsibility (Cambridge University Press). An edited collection on this contested idea, looking at its origins, applications and implications. 260