Abstract
This article takes a closer look at the scientific, policy and catalytic functions of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and its Assembly (UNEA) and UNEA’s role in addressing emerging issues in international environmental policy and law by examining two concrete examples. The first shows how UNEA was able to contribute to the international environmental law on mercury: UNEA played a catalytic policy role by contributing to the development of international soft law, customary law, and treaty law. Further, UNEA played a policy shaping role by influencing the further development of key international environmental law principles in the negotiations of new environmental norms in other fora. The second example describes UNEA’s unsuccessful attempt to address geoengineering. Building on the two examples, the article identifies factors that support or impede the fulfilment of UNEA’s role in addressing emerging issues of international environmental policy and law.
Highlights
Over the last 50 years, the environment has emerged as an important policy area that needs international attention
United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) contributes to the growing body of soft law, to the emergence of general principles of law, to the crystallization and affirmation of customary international law, and to the codification and formulation of new international law through treaty law. In this process of creating hard and soft law, UNEA would typically have to follow three steps: first, it must identify an issue of critical international environmental concern. This step is inherently linked to its scientific function, as reflected in United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)’s and UNEA’s mandate to “keep under review the world environmental situation in order to ensure that emerging environmental problems with international significance receive appropriate and adequate consideration by Governments” [44] (para 2(d)), to “disseminate and share evidence-based environmental information” [48] (§ 88(e)) and to “promote a strong science-policy interface by reviewing the state of the environment” [48] (§ 88(d)) [50] (§ 8)
The reference to precaution in the draft decision became a fundamental difference in the negotiations and due to lack of consensus, Switzerland and its co-sponsors withdrew the proposal in the closing session of the Committee of the Whole [115]. While it seems that the political climate was not yet ready to allow a decision on this issue, the presentation of the resolution on geoengineering at UNEA-4 may have triggered the beginning of the multilateral conversation of the climate altering technologies generally assumed under the term “geoengineering” and on how the world might deal with and govern these technologies [116]
Summary
Over the last 50 years, the environment has emerged as an important policy area that needs international attention. While the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 can be seen as an important step to integrate environmental concerns into a more traditional development policy, the international community is still dealing with environmental problems using an ad hoc, piecemeal and issue-by-issue approach. This has led to a mushrooming of partial solutions, “a myriad of multilateral agreements” [10] This article concludes that UNEP has all the ingredients needed to be such an institution; countries have to be ready to make use of it
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