The Environmental Issues Global Growth Raises
Chapter Thirty-Four
Syllabus topic 2, "Sustainable Development."
Pages 100 to 102 of 663
In one line
Global growth raises six environmental issues, and each of them has an instrument in this book that was written to address it.
In exam wording: the environmental issues arising from global economic development are greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, depletion of the ozone layer, the exhaustion of renewable and non-renewable resources, the generation and transboundary movement of hazardous waste, the loss of biological diversity, and the degradation of land, freshwater and the marine environment; each is addressed by a distinct treaty regime, and the common difficulty in all six is that the cost falls on people who are not parties to the transaction that causes it.
How to answer this as a whole question
MU asked it as a whole question in 2015: "What are the Environmental issues concerning global Economic development?" A hundred marks divided by four means twenty-five for this. The structure that works is six sections, each of four short paragraphs: what the issue is, what causes it, which instrument addresses it, and how well that instrument has worked.
Issue one: greenhouse gases and the climate
What. Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and the fluorinated gases accumulate in the atmosphere and change the energy balance of the planet.
Cause. Combustion of fossil fuel for electricity, industry and transport; agriculture; land use change.
Instrument. The Framework Convention on Climate Change 1992, the Kyoto Protocol 1997 and the Paris Agreement 2015.
How well. Emissions have risen throughout. The regime has succeeded in universality and in measurement and has not yet succeeded in reduction.
Issue two: the ozone layer
What. Stratospheric ozone absorbs ultraviolet radiation. Chlorine and bromine compounds destroy it catalytically.
Cause. Refrigerants, aerosol propellants, solvents and fire suppressants.
Instrument. The Vienna Convention 1985 and the Montreal Protocol 1987.
How well. This is the success of the subject. Production of the controlled substances has fallen by more than ninety-nine per cent and the layer is recovering. Every other regime is measured against it.
Issue three: resource depletion
What. Non-renewable resources are finite; renewable ones are finite in rate.
Cause. Extraction driven by demand and by the price signal described in the previous chapter.
Instrument. No general treaty. Fisheries are addressed by the Law of the Sea Convention and the Fish Stocks Agreement 1995; the deep seabed by Part XI and the common heritage principle; forests by nothing binding at all, the Rio Forest Principles being expressly non-binding.
How well. Badly, and the absence of any general instrument is a fact worth stating.
Issue four: hazardous waste
What. Waste that is toxic, corrosive, flammable, infectious or ecotoxic, generated overwhelmingly in industrialised economies.
Cause. Production processes, and a very large difference in disposal cost between countries.
Instrument. The Basel Convention 1989 and its Ban Amendment, the Bamako Convention 1991, the Rotterdam Convention 1998, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants 2001 and the Minamata Convention 2013.
The Environmental Issues Global Growth Raises
How well. The legal traffic is controlled. The illegal traffic, and the export of goods that become waste on arrival, are not.
Issue five: biological diversity
What. Loss of ecosystems, species and genetic variety.
Cause. Habitat conversion for agriculture and settlement, over-exploitation, pollution, invasive species and climate change.
Instrument. The Convention on Biological Diversity 1992 with its Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, CITES 1973, Ramsar 1971, the World Heritage Convention 1972 and the Convention on Migratory Species 1979.
How well. No global biodiversity target has ever been met in full.
Issue six: land, freshwater and the sea
What. Desertification and soil loss; over-abstraction and pollution of rivers and aquifers; marine pollution and acidification.
Cause. Agriculture, urbanisation, industry, and the atmospheric loading described in issue one.
Instrument. The Convention to Combat Desertification 1994; for freshwater, mostly bilateral treaties; for the sea, Part XII of the Law of the Sea Convention with MARPOL, the London Convention and Protocol and the regional seas programmes.
How well. Very unevenly, and freshwater is the least regulated of the three.
The common difficulty
Write this paragraph at the end and the answer becomes an argument rather than a list.
In all six, the person who bears the cost is not a party to the transaction that causes it. The buyer of a refrigerator did not agree with the person under the ozone hole; the buyer of steel did not agree with the fisherwoman whose catch is acidified. Every instrument above is an attempt to bring the absent party into the transaction, either by making the seller pay, by requiring the buyer's consent, or by capping the total. Those three techniques are the whole toolkit of international environmental law.
Worked example
Rank the six by how well the law has done, and say why. That single paragraph turns a descriptive answer into an analytical one.
- Best: ozone. A small number of substances, identifiable manufacturers, available substitutes, a fund to pay for the switch, and trade restrictions against non-parties.
- Middle: hazardous waste and endangered species. Permits and consent work where the traffic is visible and fail where it is not.
- Worst: climate, biodiversity, freshwater. Diffuse sources, no substitutes for the underlying activity, and benefits that accrue globally while costs fall nationally.
The pattern is that the law succeeds where the polluters are few, identifiable and have an alternative, and fails where they are everybody.
Quick revision
- Six issues: climate, ozone, resource depletion, hazardous waste, biodiversity, and land, freshwater and the sea.
- Ozone is the success; climate, biodiversity and freshwater are the failures; waste and species are in between.
- Forests have no binding global instrument; the 1992 Forest Principles are expressly non-binding.
- Three techniques: make the seller pay, require the buyer's consent, cap the total.
- The common difficulty is that the cost falls on somebody outside the transaction.
The Environmental Issues Global Growth Raises
Test yourself
1. Which of the six is the regime's success, and give three reasons. Ozone. Few substances, identifiable manufacturers, available substitutes, a multilateral fund and trade restrictions against non-parties.
2. Which resource has no binding global treaty at all? Forests. The Rio Forest Principles of 1992 are expressly a non-legally binding authoritative statement.
3. State the difficulty common to all six issues. The environmental cost falls on people who are not parties to the transaction that causes it, so the market never registers it and the law has to bring the absent party in.
The rest of this subject
These notes are cut from the University's printed syllabus. Open the syllabus itself, or the past papers, for the same subject.