Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation: The Role of International Ocean and Freshwater Agreements

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Climate change presents the international community with an environmental process that is both challenging to monitor and foresee and requires a complex legal and regulatory framework capable of promoting mitigation and adaptation. In the absence of comprehensive and targeted international climate change legislation, however, some mitigation and adaptation measures are being adopted and implemented through indirect policymaking and regulation. International environmental treaties and customary international environmental laws and principles not specifically focused on climate change may nonetheless indirectly or unintentionally contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts through administration or enforcement of the legal regime. The crucial role that the water cycle plays in climatic processes, however, makes international freshwater and ocean laws and policies a particularly rich source of indirect climate change adaptation and mitigation measures. This chapter analyzes the international legal regimes regulating freshwater resources and ocean and marine resources with an eye toward mechanisms that contribute to – or detract from – climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. I find that potential for regulation of climate change is greatest when treaties are focused on discrete environmental issues such as wetland conservation and pollution from ships, while comprehensive treaties like the Watercourses Convention and the Convention on the Law of the Sea make less tangible contributions to indirect climate change regulation by reinforcing principles of international law that require states to take collective action on international environmental challenges such as climate change.