People are concerned about the degradation of the environment and the problems that go with it. Discuss the international response. (1998)
Environmental degradation is now described as a triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature loss and pollution. Its political difficulty lies in structure: the damage is global, authority is national, and abatement is a public good from which free riders benefit. Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” (1968) explains why voluntary restraint fails. The international response has therefore been an evolving search for ways to make states, markets and societies act together.
The problems that drive concern
- Transboundary and commons harm: acid rain, ozone depletion, a warming atmosphere and over-fished high seas fall outside any single jurisdiction.
- Human security: the UNDP’s 1994 report made environmental security a component of human security; degradation multiplies threats to food, water and health, and drives displacement, mostly within borders.
- Distribution: the poorest and least responsible, from island states to Indian farmers, are the most exposed. Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain (Global Warming in an Unequal World, 1991) made this the South’s charge of environmental colonialism.
Layers of the international response
- Multilateral treaties: Stockholm (1972) and UNEP; the Montreal Protocol (1987) on ozone; the Rio conventions on climate, biodiversity and desertification (1992); Kyoto (1997) and Paris (2015); the Kunming-Montreal biodiversity framework (2022) and the high-seas (BBNJ) agreement, in force since January 2026.
- Regional regulation: the European Union’s emissions trading system and its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, charged from 2026, export standards through market access, which India and others contest as unilateral.
- Science and civil society: the IPCC acts as an epistemic community in Peter M. Haas’s sense, while transnational movements, from Greenpeace to youth climate strikes, pressure governments from outside.
- Markets and private governance: carbon pricing, the Paris Article 6 credit rules, forest certification and corporate net-zero pledges, though the last invite charges of greenwashing.
- Courts: Urgenda (Netherlands, 2019), the European Court of Human Rights’ KlimaSeniorinnen ruling (2024), the ICJ advisory opinion of July 2025, and India’s M.K. Ranjitsinh judgment (2024) recognising a right against climate change’s adverse effects.
- Southern initiatives: India’s International Solar Alliance, the loss and damage fund (2022–23), island states’ legal diplomacy, and India’s NDC for 2031–35 (approved March 2026: a 47% intensity cut and 60% non-fossil capacity by 2035).
How effective has it been?
- The success case: Montreal worked because substitutes existed, producers were few and the harm was visible; the ozone layer is on course to recover between about 2040 and 2066, depending on region.
- The shortfall: global greenhouse-gas emissions were still rising in 2024; warming averaged about 1.48°C over 2023–25; none of the twenty Aichi biodiversity targets was fully met; and the plastics treaty talks collapsed at Geneva in August 2025, with the February 2026 session only electing a new chair.
- Theoretical reading: Oran R. Young separates a regime’s output from its impact, and the environmental regime is rich in the first and poor in the second. Elinor Ostrom’s polycentric governance explains why action by cities, firms and courts now matters as much as treaties; Marxist critics reply that green markets leave accumulation, the root cause, untouched.
- Politics: sovereignty, consensus rules, unmet finance pledges and the second US withdrawal from Paris (effective January 2026), then notice to quit the UNFCCC itself, constrain every layer.
Conclusion
The response has been broad, inventive and increasingly multi-level, but slower than the degradation it targets. Its future lies less in new treaties than in finance for the South, the falling cost of clean technology and courts converting soft commitments into enforceable duties.