Environmental Treaties, conventions, and protocols

Relevance for Global Studies

Earth is a sensitive, closed, dynamic ecosystem. Recent global environmental, political, and socioeconomic interacting challenges include pollution; chemical and nuclear risks; climate change and biodiversity loss; destructive terrestrial and marine resource exploitation; habitat, soil, and freshwater degradation; desertification; increasing human-caused environmental disasters; overpopulation; poverty; and political instability. These serious and interconnected environment-related [Page 513]fields of global political action require regulating agreements, and they imply and demonstrate mechanisms and correlations of globalization par excellence. Because global human-made environmental problems cannot be solved at a national level, they require international solutions as arranged by interdisciplinary-experienced experts. A corresponding cross-sectoral environmental education typically demands a global studies approach.

Major Global Environmental Agreements

Starting in the 19th century, numerous environmental agreements at a regional and a global scale came into existence; some of these agreements are listed in Table 1. Albeit not legally binding and not agreements in the closer sense, at least two outstanding cross-disciplinary, signed UN declarations set an important trend with their global holistic sustainability approach: (1) the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development from 1992-also known as Agenda 21-with the strategic call for global thinking and local acting, and (2) the UN Millennium Declaration from 2000, which includes respect for nature and was specified by the socially focused Millennium Development Goals, targeting environmental sustainability under goal 7. As a result of the world summit in Rio de Janeiro, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and particularly the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) are currently among the most modern and complex agreements.

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