International environmental agreement

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An international environmental agreements (Engl. International environmental agreement , often IEA for short) is an agreement between two or more States in the field of environment . Agreements between two countries are referred to as bilateral , agreements between three or more countries are usually referred to as multilateral environmental agreements ( MEA ). International environmental agreements provide, in addition to the environmental customary international law , the International Environmental Law . They are the subject of international and global environmental policy .

The Ecolex database set up by the International Union for the Preservation of Nature (IUCN), the World Food Organization (FAO) and the United Nations Environment Program lists around 2000 international environmental agreements as of April 2020 (→  List of international environmental agreements ).

Definition and demarcation

The American political scientist Ronald B. Mitchell defines, in accordance with the concept of the international treaty of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties , an international environmental agreement as

"An intergovernmental document intended as legally binding with a primary stated purpose of preventing or managing human impacts on natural resources."

"An intergovernmental document that is intended to be legally binding, with a stated primary aim to prevent or manage human impacts on natural resources."

In this definition, both original agreements that regulate something new, as well as their additions and amendments through protocols and amending treaties, belong to the international environmental agreements. The decisive factor for being able to speak of an agreement is not the designation as a “treaty”, “convention”, “convention”, “protocol” or the like. Rather, what is decisive, according to the prevailing opinion , is that the contracting parties agree with their consent under international law want to bind. This distinguishes international agreements from soft law , which includes non-binding declarations of intent or recommendations.

States and international organizations as subjects of international law can sign such agreements and thus become party to them. State associations such as B. the European Union also have the option of becoming a party to an international environmental agreement. This distinguishes them from transnational initiatives such as the Global Compact , in which sub-state actors participate and which are not legally binding. International agreements are often negotiated under the auspices of an international organization, such as the United Nations .

It is difficult to classify contracts in the subject area "environment". In some agreements, nature and environmental protection are only a minor aspect, but they can be of great importance in environmental protection. This applies, for example, to the Antarctic Treaty or the Convention on the Law of the Sea . Mitchell's definition is based on the declared goal and not on the actual effects of the contracts. In its definition, environmental agreements are those whose declared main aim is to avoid or manage the effects of human activity on natural resources, including the atmosphere , oceans , rivers and lakes, terrestrial habitats and other elements of nature as natural resources Provide ecosystem services. Other definitions focus on the effects of the contracts, difficulties in this case are the point in time at which the effects are analyzed, and contracts that aim to achieve environmental protection but actually remain ineffective.

The geographical scope of multilateral environmental agreements can vary widely. While in the case of UN-initiated environmental agreements (e.g. Biodiversity Convention ), as a rule, all states worldwide can become party to a contract, other international environmental agreements are regionally oriented (e.g. the Bern Convention for Europe ).

International agreements can be linked to one another and to other, also informal and non-state, principles, rules and procedures in their subject area; the totality of the im- and explicit norms of an area is sometimes referred to as a regime .

development

Agreed multilateral environmental agreements: Share of different subject areas in the total, per decade

Individual environmental agreements existed as early as 1900, the database of international environmental agreements (IEADB) at the University of Oregon lists the first bilateral agreements with England from the High Middle Ages on fishing rights. Up until the middle of the 20th century there were some important species protection agreements , including the London Agreement for the Protection of Wildlife Species (1900), a forerunner of the Washington Convention , the Agreement for the Protection of Birds Useful for Agriculture (1902) for the transboundary protection of birds in Europe or the International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling (1946). The early 1970s saw the beginning of a broader international environmental order. As a result of the World Environment Conference in Stockholm in 1972, the 113 participating states committed to cross-border cooperation in environmental and nature conservation. The conference also launched the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

In the 1970s and 1980s, it was possible to address regional problems of water and air pollution in international agreements. For the European area, these included agreements on the protection of the North Sea (Oslo Agreement, 1972) or the agreement on long-range transboundary air pollution (Geneva, 1979).

In the second half of the 1980s, the importance of global environmental policy grew . The global problem of the destruction of the ozone layer was regulated by the Vienna Convention (1985) in conjunction with the Montreal Protocol (1987). These agreements were accepted by all countries in the world. The Global Environment Facility , founded in 1991, was designed to provide financial support to poor countries in tackling environmental problems. The Earth Summit in Rio (1992), in the aftermath of the Stockholm Environment Conference of 1972, led u. a. on Agenda 21 as a guideline for sustainable development, the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Biodiversity Convention .

In the 2000s, the focus of international environmental policy shifted to the implementation of the existing agreements.

Bilateral environmental agreements

In bilateral environmental agreements, two states regulate their intended cooperation in the environmental field either at government or departmental level between the environment ministries.

Germany

Since the establishment of an independent Federal Environment Ministry in 1986, Germany has concluded a large number of bilateral agreements with many partner countries in Europe and in other regions of the world. One example is the German-Russian governmental agreement on cooperation in the field of environmental protection of May 28, 1992 ( Federal Law Gazette II p. 1240 ).

Multilateral environmental agreements

The number of multilateral environmental agreements gradually increased from the 1950s to the 1980s and then skyrocketed in the 1990s. From 2000 to 2017, fewer original contracts were added, the proportion of changes and protocols to existing agreements increased.

By 2020, over 1,300 multilateral environmental agreements had been successfully negotiated. The IEADB identifies 290 lineages, i.e. related families, from an original agreement and related protocols and amending agreements that expand or modify it. More than two-thirds of the lineages consist only of the original and one or two amending contracts. The ten most extensive lines consist of twenty or more treaties each; almost a third of all multilateral agreements come from them.

Well-known original environmental agreements are the Vienna Convention on the Protection of the Ozone Layer , the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Biodiversity Convention (CBD) and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). The most important protocols include the Montreal Protocol , the Kyoto Protocol , which has supplemented the UNFCCC since 1997, or the Cartagena Protocol and the Nagoya Protocol for the protection of biodiversity. Well-known amendment agreements include the subsequent tightening of the Montreal Protocol of London 1990 , Copenhagen 1992, Montreal 1997 and finally Beijing 1999.

design

organization

Many multilateral agreements establish a conference of the States parties , which takes place regularly, often annually, as the highest decision-making body. Permanent or ad-hoc working groups carry out preparatory work for the conferences. A secretariat takes on organizational tasks, prepares documents and supports the flow of information between states. The environmental and sustainability scientist Sebastian Oberthür and political scientist Thomas Gehring call based on these organs three types of international regimes: those existing in international organizations, which then also provide the secretariat and communication channels, this marine protected counts the MARPOL Convention , those with its own Conference of the Parties and its own secretariat, for example the International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine , and finally those who place the secretariat in an international organization but conduct the Conference of the Parties under their own direction, such as the Washington Convention on Endangered Species or the protection of the ozone layer within the framework of the Vienna Convention whose secretariats are based at UNEP. Separate state conferences and secretariats are more common in regional agreements where there is a lack of suitable international organizations, while the third model is common in more recent global agreements.

codification

In international environmental law, the construction of a framework convention and protocols is common. The framework agreement lays down general objectives and principles. Protocols complement and substantiate these. This enables the international community to react better to new scientific knowledge, and not all contracting parties to a framework agreement have to ratify a protocol in every case. An example here was the regime for the protection of the ozone layer with the Vienna Convention as a framework convention, which was supplemented by the Montreal Protocol and which in turn was modified in numerous changes. These agreements were also the first to be ratified by all United Nations states.

literature

Web links

Commons : Environmental treaties  - collection of images, videos, and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Treaties. In: Ecolex. Retrieved April 4, 2020 .
  2. ^ A b c d Ronald B. Mitchell: International Environmental Agreements: A Survey of Their Features, Formation, and Effects . In: Annual Review of Environment and Resources . 2003, doi : 10.1146 / annurev.energy.28.050302.105603 .
  3. ↑ a b data: Online Appendix for "What We Know (and Could Know) about International Environmental Agreements". Retrieved April 13, 2020 . See Fig. 1 and 2 in: Ronald B. Mitchell, Liliana B. Andonova, Mark Axelrod, Jörg Balsiger, Thomas Bernauer, Jessica F. Green, James Hollway, Rakhyun E. Kim, Jean-Frédéric Morin: What We Know ( and Could Know) About International Environmental Agreements . In: Global Environmental Politics . February 2020, doi : 10.1162 / glep_a_00544 .
  4. ↑ IEADB Agreement List. In: IEADB. Retrieved April 8, 2020 (search with “Signed between… and 1800-01-01”).
  5. ↑ a b c d Sebastian Oberthür: International environmental policy . In: Federal Center for Political Education (Hrsg.): Information on Political Education . No. 287 , May 6, 2008 ( bpb.de ).
  6. ↑ a b H. Korn, J. Stadler, G. Stolpe: International conventions, programs and organizations in nature conservation (=  BfN scripts . No. 1 ). 2nd Edition. 1998, p. 90 ( bfn.de [PDF; 304 kB ]).
  7. ^ Klaus Dingwerth: Global environmental policy. Berlin Institute for Population and Development , April 2008, accessed on April 8, 2020 .
  8. ↑ Ronald B. Mitchell, Liliana B. Andonova, Mark Axelrod, Jörg Balsiger, Thomas Bernauer, Jessica F. Green, James Hollway, Rakhyun E. Kim, Jean-Frédéric Morin: What We Know (and Could Know) About International Environmental Agreements . In: Global Environmental Politics . February 2020, doi : 10.1162 / glep_a_00544 .
  9. ↑ Sebastian Oberthür, Thomas Gehring: Conclusion: International environmental policy through negotiations and contracts . In: International Environmental Regime . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 1997, ISBN 978-3-8100-1702-4 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-663-10392-9_13 .
  10. ^ Andreas von Arnauld : Völkerrecht . CF Müller, 2014, ISBN 978-3-8114-6323-3 , pp. 94, 367 .
  11. ↑ Elizabeth R. DeSombre: The Experience of the Montreal Protocol: Particularly Remarkable and Remarkably Particular . In: UCLA Journal of Environmental Law and Policy . tape 19 , no. 1 , 2000 ( escholarship.org ). To the current status, with all changes: All ratifications. UNEP Ozone Secretariat, February 5, 2020, accessed April 2, 2020 .
  12. ↑ Environment: European Union welcomes the worldwide ratification of the Montreal Protocol on the protection of the ozone layer. European Commission, September 16, 2009, accessed on October 17, 2016 (the new UN member South Sudan followed in 2012 ).