Module 10: Environmental Issues

The issue of environmental degradation and specifically the impact of human behaviour on the environmental is neither new nor controversial. When rivers can literally burn due to the pollutants we have put in them, there is a clear problem. It is a problem that can easily be identified and a problem that can be solved, albeit with economic costs. It is a problem that is associated with the narratives of industrialization, of modernity, and ultimately of anthropocentrism: the belief that human beings are the most significant entity in the world and that nature exists to serve us. The processes of globalization have been a medium to export and privilege these views to a global level. Technology has powered industrialization, trade, and colonialism. European political and economic structures have been transplanted around the world. Western culture has been broadcast to a global audience, glorifying and romanticizing a consumption lifestyle. On the other hand, the globalization of politics has also been a means to address environmental issues via norms, regimes, and institutional responses, albeit to a varying degree of success. We have seen the rise of increasingly vocal and influential social movements to address specific environmental problems and environmental protection more broadly. It has become generally accepted that many environmental issues are fundamentally global in nature and require a global response: atmospheric and ocean pollution do not recognize political borders; ocean acidification is not limited to the territorial waters of polluters; holes in the ozone layer do not restrict harmful UV rays to those who, pre-1989, used aerosols for big 80s hair. While the problems are generally recognized, the solutions are more evasive. Substantive solutions to these global issues require, or perhaps more accurately will require, robust global environmental governance. This module will first look at a brief history of global environmental awareness, global responses to environmental issues, and climate change as the most pressing contemporary issue.

Some of the earliest environmental movements in Europe sprang from Romanticism, a humanist movement focused on the beauty of nature and human emotion. These romantics challenged the predominant view of nature as a resource to be utilized by humans for their own interests. Instead, they saw beauty and interdependency between humans and the environment. More substantively, environmental movements expanded during the industrial revolution of the late 19^th century which generated increasing environmental externalities: deforestation, unrestricted air pollution, and disposal of industrial waste. This led to the befoulment of the rivers, the lakes, the land, and the air.

It also motivated early conservationists like Henry David Thoreau, who argued we must live in harmony with nature, and John Muir, who established the Sierra Club in 1892. The Sierra Club was one of the earliest national environmental pressure groups in the US. It was founded to protect the Sierra Nevada, hence the name, but expanded to look at land management, infrastructure projects, and environmental issues across the US.

In Canada, early naturalists included Samuel de Champlain and Catherine Parr Traill who documented the flora and fauna they encountered during their exploration and settlement in Canada. The early 20^th century saw movements to protect endangered species, from buffalo to whales. Many countries instituted national policies to protect aspects of the environment and regulate industrial waste. An important early effort at international conservation was the 1946 International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling. It evolved from simply regulating the whaling industry to trying to enforce a moratorium on whaling altogether. This shift remains contentious to this day with Japan, Norway, and Iceland still operating whaling fleets.

However, the modern environmental movement really began to take shape in the 1960s, often dated to the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1962. The book detailed the negative impact of pesticides on the environment and by extension the threat that human activity was, and many would argue still is, posing to our own food chain. Essentially, she argued we were killing ourselves by polluting the very things that sustain us: food, air, and water. The book proved a tipping point in the US, generating a debate in the general public about the need to regulate behaviour to protect the environment, and in particular economic activity. In the 1970s, important and influential interest groups emerged, like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace. They pursued public campaigns to protect wildlife, highlighting for example the plights of tigers and the deeply troubling ivory trade. Friends of the Earth was founded as an international anti-nuclear movement but quickly evolved to cover global issues from desertification and the melting of the polar ice caps to issues of economic justice and critiquing neoliberal economics.

Greenpeace started in Canada as an anti-nuclear group, specifically the testing of nuclear weapons on the Alaskan island of Amchitka. It has evolved into one of the most preeminent international environmental groups, now based in the Netherlands with offices in 40 countries and almost three million members.

At the international level, the first UN Conference on the Human Environment was held in Stockholm in 1972, led by Canadian under-secretary Maurice Strong. This was the first of what would become known as Earth Summits, conferences held every 10 years to generate ideas and assess progress on sustainable development. The inaugural Earth Summit in 1972 produced the first ‘state of the environment’ report. It also led to the establishment of the UN Environment programme. In the 1980s, epistemic communities begin to form around light pollution, ocean pollution, noise pollution, air pollution, et cetera. Some of these communities were relatively isolated, constituted by marine biologists or astronomers for example. However, the discovery of the hole in the ozone layer created a more substantial and global response. The hole was caused by Chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, and was strongly linked to the increase of UV-B radiation and a subsequent threat of skin cancer. CFCs were commonly used in refrigerants, aerosol propellants, and solvents. The common narrative at the time linked everyday actions like cooling our cars and creating big hair styles were increasing our chances of dying. A narrative very similar to that generated by Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring. The result was the total ban on CFCs via the Montreal Protocol in 1987.

Another important event in the 1980s was the 1983 UN World Commission on Environment and Development led by former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Brundtland. The Commission produced the Brundtland Report which first established the idea of ‘sustainable development’.

An important aspect of sustainable development was recognizing the need to reconcile both the environmental and economic aspects of development. The meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986 sparked substantial opposition to nuclear energy, something recently brought back to the world’s attention with the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima.

] In the 1990s, global warming and the north/south divide became hot environmental topics and were directly addressed at the third Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, 1992. One of the outcomes of the 1992 Earth Summit led to the Kyoto Protocol which sought to cut CO2 emissions in an attempt to halt global warming. An important point of contention between these two issues was, and continues to be, the tension between the Global North and the Global South on CO2 emissions. The North has traditionally hesitated to commit to binding targets on reducing carbon dioxide emissions due to fears of harming their economic competitiveness. While at the same time, much of the South was given exemptions from the Kyoto Protocol in order to facilitate their economic development. This tension remains an important obstacle to a meaningful global response to environmental issues. Since the 2000s, environmental policy has become mainstream. Environmental debates have become an important part of the elections in both the Global North and South. Government policy is increasingly critiqued through an environmental lens. Movements have globally coalesced around environmental issues, including species protection, combatting all forms of pollution, desertification, and nuclear proliferation. Perhaps the most visible environmental issue has been global climate change. The global scientific community has predominantly concluded that global warming is unequivocal and that it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause. In response, there have been significant advancements made in environmental protection, including the creation of nature preserves on land and in the ocean, the recovery of endangered species from sea turtles to giant pandas, and organized resistance to environmental threats like Dakota Access Pipeline. Many of these achievements are either localized, requiring at most bilateral agreements, or linked to very specific causes amenable to narrow policy responses. The outstanding issue has been climate change, a more complex issue with multiple causes, variable impact, and a serious lag in cause and effect. The Paris Agreement, reached in 2015, was intended to be a significant step towards addressing climate change. However, as we will see in the following sections, its status is in doubt with US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the agreement. Today, there is a wide spread recognition that environmental protection is the responsibility of us all, both individually and collectively. Individually, people are increasingly making choices based on their environmental footprint. Collectively, local and national governments are putting policy in place to achieve environmental sustainability. However, there has also been a recognition that contemporary environmental issues are global, requiring bilateral and multilateral responses. It is to global environmental governance that we turn to now.

There has been significant movement on addressing localized environmental issues through national regulatory bodies. There has also been significant movement on bilateral agreements and treaties that address transboundary issues. However, global environmental issues have been more difficult to deal with, in particular things considered to be part of the global commons: those resources that are owned by no one but accessible to all, like the atmosphere, the seas, and even outer space.

Much of the reason for this is the anarchical structure of global politics, defined by the absence of an overarching authority. In other words, there is no world government responsible for the drafting and enforcement of global legislation to attenuate global environmental problems. If you remember, this is something we spoke of in detail in the module concerning political globalization. Yet these global environmental problems do exist, they are increasingly posing a threat to people around the world, and they increasingly require a multilateral response. However, while there may not be a global government, there is global governance in specific policy niches. Global governance refers to the disparate collection of norms, regimes, and institutions that enables or constrains particular behaviour at the international level. It is constituted by both formal and informal actors. Formal actors include international institutions like UN agencies as well as states which have legal personality. It also includes formal agreements like the Montreal Protocol, and regimes like the Paris Agreement. Informal actors include civil society organizations and the scientific community operating at both the national and international levels. Other informal influences include normative principles which create informal expectations of behaviour. Together, these formal and informal actors and processes guide behaviour on a number of global issues, not the least of which includes global environmental governance.

In this section, we will look specifically at governance of the global commons: the totality of actors and processes which seek to regulate behaviour that poses a threat to the global environment. For example, human action has damaged the atmosphere resulting both in specific problems, like holes in the ozone layer, and more general problems, like climate change.

Both the hole in the ozone layer and changes to the climate exemplify the ‘tragedy of the commons’ at the global level, or the ‘global commons’. The ‘tragedy of the commons’ is a situation where unrestricted access to a resource that is owned by nobody, incentivizes overuse and lack of due diligence. Such resources are rapidly depleted and/or polluted.

Within the domestic realm, the ‘tragedy of commons’ can be dealt with by converting it into private property, nationalizing it, or in some way regulating it. However, the first two options are unavailable at the level of the global commons. You cannot privatize the atmosphere. You cannot nationalize the atmosphere. You can only create regimes to govern global commons such as the atmosphere.

Such governance begins with the identification of an environmental threat often from an epistemic community: a global network of experts which help decision makers to both define and respond to threats. These experts largely include members of the scientific community but may also include activists and civil society organizations.  These are people who are deeply invested in particular environmental issues, whether that be the ozone, ocean ecology, or deforestation. They are often the first people to become aware of problems and therefore can act as a tripwire to notify the broader population. This is very much like Carson’s book Silent Spring which alerted the general population to the damage being caused to the food chain and the threat it posed to humans. Once the epistemic community has identified a threat, their members begin to look at it, collect and share data, and try to quantify the problem. If a consensus emerges around the definition of a problem and what is needed to address it, regimes are pursued. These regimes are most often the product of interstate negotiations, the purpose of which is to create environmental policy frameworks. These policy frameworks constitute rules that seek to establish what is acceptable behaviour concerning the exploitation of the global commons. One of the most successful examples of such a regime is the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer, better known as the Montreal Protocol. The Montreal Protocol started with the epistemic community noting the adverse effect of Chlorofluorocarbons on the ozone layer. Data was collected and shared, establishing this relationship. It was also noted the hazard that ozone depletion represented, specifically the increase in ultraviolet-B radiation which would lead to an increase in the incidence of skin cancer as well as harming crops and marine life. Consequently, a regime was created to phase out the production of substances identified as negatively impacting the ozone layer.

Figure 10-18: Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol#/media/File:Ozone_cfc_trends.png
Permission: Public Domain.

In order to be effective, regimes like the Montreal Protocol have to deal with the issue of compliance. It is very difficult to make sovereign states comply with international agreements since, under the condition of anarchy, there is no overarching authority to compel them to do so. States and other non-state actors have an incentive to ‘free ride’: to benefit from a collective agreement while not contributing towards it or to even operate in breach of it. Mechanisms that are used to encourage compliance range from ‘naming and shaming’ to ‘capacity building’ to incorporating international regimes into domestic law. Naming and shaming involves applying normative pressure on actors to live up to their agreements. Capacity building refers to the provision of funds, technology, expertise, and networks to achieve the desired goal of regimes. This often takes the form of commitments made by actors in the Global North to enable actors in the Global South to play a meaningful role in meeting the obligations of environmental agreements. Finally, the most powerful means to ensure compliance is when international agreements are incorporated directly into domestic law. Referring back to the Montreal Protocol, all three mechanisms are in play. Under the Montreal Protocol, there are systems of reporting and review which facilitate naming and shaming those who breach the rules. The protocol also established a multilateral fund to compensate developing economies in shifting away from the manufacture and use of CFCs. Finally, and most effectively, there has been the internalization of the Montreal Protocol by leading economies, including the US and the EU. The Montreal Protocol is an example of how global environmental governance can work. But as we will see in the next section, the lessons learned from why it was effective may be more limited than many would like to believe.

The last section started with the problem of achieving meaningful solutions to global environmental problems under the condition of anarchy. It ended on a promising note with the success of the Montreal Protocol in achieving meaningful gains in reversing the damage done to the ozone layer. However, now we turn to a more vexing and potentially more pressing issue, climate change. Climate change has been debated amongst scientists since the late 19^th century when greenhouse gases were first identified and began to be studied to assess their impact on the environment. However, it was not until the 1980s that a consensus emerged on the scope and danger of climate change in the associated epistemic communities. In particular, it was noted that rising concentrations of greenhouse gases are creating an alarming increase in the ambient global temperature, more commonly referred to as global warming.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that current trends in CO2 emissions, a powerful greenhouse gas, will result in a global temperature increase ranging between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. The consequences of this temperature increase are debated but are potentially devastating, including rising sea levels, more extreme weather patterns, and a flood of environmental refugees. Take the Maldives for example, an archipelago south of India, which is the world’s lowest lying country.

The UN predicts the islands will be underwater by 2100. So what happens when an entire country sinks beneath the sea? Since 2008, the government has been investigating the possibility of buying a ‘new country’ as a contingency. In 2009, the Maldives government held an underwater cabinet meeting to draw attention to the problem of climate change. If these efforts fail, nearly 400,000 people will become climate refugees from one country alone. To mitigate such risk, the IPCC argues the global community must keep the increase of the global temperature under 2 degrees Celsius.

So far, engagement with the issue of climate change is not that different from the Montreal Protocol. Both climate change and ozone depletion are known problems. They both have identified solutions. However, here is where they part ways. The Montreal Protocol dealt with the problem of ozone depletion by banning CFCs. A simple to understand and simple to implement solution, linked to a concrete problem where alternatives were available. But stopping global temperatures from rising above 2 degrees Celsius is more complicated. Any attempt to mitigate global temperature increases will require making substantive changes to the way we live, the way we work, the way we travel, the way we shop, the way we consume, et cetera… All of which are a product of the globalization we have been discussing in this course: the technology underpinning it, the economy driving it, the culture that glorifies it, the political structure that governs it. Trying to mitigate global warming and climate change drives deep wedges into the current global order: it pits the economically developed world against the developing world and the rich against the poor. It threatens the prosperity of the wealthiest and threatens the livelihood of the poorest. Repairing the hole in the ozone layer could be solved with entrepreneurship. It could be addressed within the current global economic, political, and cultural order. Combatting climate change in any meaningful way will likely require fundamentally rethinking all of these. It will require speaking truth to power.

There have been efforts, mostly unsuccessful, to deal with greenhouse gas emissions, global warming, and ultimately climate change. In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol committed developed economies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 5.2% below their 1990 levels by the year 2012. The primary mechanism to achieve this was through an emissions trading regime and emission offsetting arrangements. The Kyoto Protocol was criticized from the outset since major emitting countries like China and India were excluded from mandatory emissions reduction targets. This was because it was argued that climate change was a consequence of the early industrialized states and therefore they should lead efforts to cut emissions. It was also argued that they had the means to do so while many developing countries lacked the requisite resources. However, the potential costs of the Kyoto Protocol led the US to renounce it in 2001 and Canada to follow suit in 2011.

At Doha in 2012, the protocol was extended to 2020 but many important states failed to commit to a second round of emission reduction targets or they have indicated they will not/cannot meet their agreed targets. In 2015, there was a reset of sorts, with a renewed effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and contain global warming outside of the Kyoto Protocol: the Paris Agreement. This time the US and major emitting countries like China and India would be included. The agreement has 174 state parties and has been signed by 195 states in total.

] It takes effect in 2020 and seeks to keep the increase of global temperature below 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels by the year 2100. While parties to the agreement are able to define their own means to achieve targets, the agreement is comprehensive, seeking to ensure compliance through mitigation, adaptation, and monitoring provisions. In terms of mitigation provisions, it sets out the provisions for a global carbon market. This will allow states to buy and sell carbon assets. In terms of adaptation provisions, it enhances the capacity of states to deal with global warming by increasing resilience to new vulnerabilities. This would be at least partly realized by the establishment of a 100 billion dollar a year climate fund between 2020 and 2025. In terms of monitoring provisions, it sets out a mechanism to track state progress on their climate commitments with formalized checks every five years.

However, the agreement has also been criticized on three grounds. First, the UN Environment Program estimates that the reductions agreed to may not be enough to achieve the goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Thus, while a step in the right direction, many argue that political and economic considerations are taking precedence over the realities of climate change. Second, the agreement does not specify exact means for states to achieve their commitments. Rather each state establishes its own Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to the agreement. If they do not meet their own NDCs, the agreement does not specify any punishments for failing to achieve them. Third, and perhaps most problematic, has been the decision by the US under the Trump Administration to withdraw from the agreement. While they are not able to legally withdraw until 2020, near the end of President Trump’s term, doing so will jeopardize the agreement. The US represents 15% of global carbon commissions.

] It represents a significant pool of financial and entrepreneurial talent that will not be applied to climate mitigation. American withdrawal will put pressure on other states to do the same, especially trade rivals like China, Brazil, and India. Essentially, the possibility of US withdrawal threatens to unravel the agreement. Without universality, or at least having all the major emitting states on board, it will be very difficult to achieve meaningful progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, global warming, and climate change.

It is useful to briefly contrast the success of the Montreal Protocol with the failure of the Kyoto Protocol and the fragility of the Paris Agreement. The Montreal Protocol was successful because it identified a clear problem, proposed a relatively simple solution, and put measures in place to build capacity and ensure compliance. The Kyoto Protocol did identify a clear problem but did not propose a clear solution. Moreover, the solutions that were identified came with high costs to be disproportionately born by a few states. Finally, even if these states did meet their obligations, there was no guarantee the desired outcomes would be achieved. The Paris Agreement was more universal and did identify clearer goals. Yet is also suffers from a lack of specificity in the means to achieve them and a lack of penalties for not doing so. However, perhaps most notable, is the fragility of the agreement. If the US or another major emitting state does pull out, the pressure will be intense on other states to do the same. There will be a lot of pressure for states to withdraw from the agreement or fail to meet their NDCs since to meet these levels will require fundamental changes to every aspect of how we conceptualize modern life. And yet, failing to do so poses almost unimaginable risk.

In this module, we have looked at the issues surrounding the global environment, the problems that are manifesting, and attempts to address them. It has been argued that the rise of industrialization, the commodification of the economy, and its spread through western institutions has resulted in environmental problems. Some of these problems are national and can be addresses domestically. Some of these problems are a bit broader, requiring bilateral responses. As we saw in ‘The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement’ of 1987, bilateral agreements are far more difficult to achieve than purely domestic solutions. Today we are facing global problems that require multilateral solutions to establish regimes of environmental governance. As we saw in the example of the Montreal Protocol as a regime to deal with ozone holes, it is possible. But as we also saw with the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, there are obstacles that we do not know how to overcome yet. The objectives of the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement require fundamental changes to our economic, political, and cultural structures. There are powerful interests working against such changes. And yet, if we do not limit greenhouse gas emissions, curb global temperature increases, and deal substantively with global climate change, there is potentially a far higher price to be paid in the future. The global community knows this; what is unknown is how to deal with it.

The tragedy of the commons is an economic problem in which every individual tries to reap the greatest benefit from a given resource. As the demand for the resource overwhelms the supply, every individual who consumes an additional unit directly harms others who can no longer enjoy the benefits. At the global level, this often means dealing with issues of pollution and/or over use of the atmosphere, the seas, the forests, and the land. Within domestic jurisdictions, these problems can be dealt with by privatization, nationalization, or some form of government regulation. These are difficult to achieve at the global level. Privatization and nationalization are not possible. Governance is possible but difficult to achieve under the condition of anarchy.

The Montreal Protocol is an international treaty designed to protect the ozone layer by phasing out the production of numerous substances that are responsible for ozone depletion, most notably CFCs. It is deemed one of the most successful examples of environmental governance. By banning CFCs and putting into place compliance measures, there has been significant improvement of the holes in the ozone. It was successful because it was a clearly identified problem, with a simple and clear solution, that didn’t fundamentally challenge the existing economic order.

A ‘free rider’ is an actor who either benefits or takes advantage of a resource, good, or service without paying or contributing towards it. In the case of environmental agreements, a free rider may choose not to contribute to an agreement or may choose not to live up to their commitments. In so doing, they may benefit from the goals of the agreement without contributing towards it or they may benefit by acting contrary to it. When applying the free rider problem to environmental governance, it often becomes an issue of putting in place compliance measures including naming and shaming, capacity building, or direct inclusion in domestic law.

The Paris Climate Summit is an agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) dealing with greenhouse gas emissions mitigation, adaptation and finance starting in the year 2020. It resets attempts to deal with greenhouse gas emissions that had become deeply flawed under the Kyoto Protocol. While it is comprehensive, including all the major emitting states, and includes compliance measures, it is also highly criticized: it doesn’t include specific means to achieve its goals, it doesn’t specify specific penalties for non-compliance, and the threat of a US withdrawal highlights the fragility of the agreement.

An epistemic community is a transnational network of knowledge-based experts who help decision-makers to define the problems they face, identify various policy solutions and assess the policy outcomes. They are often scientists but may also include civil society actors or others with a deep interest in particular fields.