World Environment Organization Research Articles

SWOT Analysis of Future Trends in BEV-related Technologies: Xiaomi Automobile Co., Ltd's Latest Product as a Case Study

The new energy vehicle sector has benefited from numerous subsidies in response to the World Environmental Protection Organization's and governments' calls for a reduction in carbon emissions. Battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), the kind of EV with the lowest carbon emissions, have gained popularity in the automotive industry. Using a battery system as a power system not only improves efficiency but also ensures that it does not pollute the environment. Along with other technological advancements like the incorporation of cutting-edge chips in the central controls of the vehicle and latest AI systems, the convenience of BEVs for consumers keeps increasing. This paper introduces the new technology systems included in the latest products launched by Xiaomi, such as the new battery system, smart driving system, and all-round AI system. Then more analyses of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of BEVs in the future with the impact of new technology. The analysis not only raises some of the technical issues that need to be addressed in BEVs today but also points to the crisis that will exist in the BEV market in the future. After analyzing the situation, some recommendations and directions for in-depth research were given. And take Xiaomi's latest BEV product as an example to further do a SWOT analysis of Xiaomi's strategic development into the BEV market.

Global Environmental Governance Reform: The Emerging Debate on the Need for a World Environment Organisation

Environmental problems, such as climate change, ocean pollution, the depletion of fisheries, and loss of biological diversity, have come to demonstrate most openly our current global interconnectedness. Governments continue to set-up international mechanisms for tackling global-scale environmental problems which has led to a complex international bureaucracy, significant burdens on national administrative capabilities in both the developed and the developing world, and, most importantly, inability on the part of existing international or national bodies to successfully deal with the problems at hand. In this context, the question of the most suitable governance architecture for the scale and scope of contemporary global environmental problems has become an important focus of both policy and academic debates. Scholars and politicians alike have argued that if we do not address governance failures, our stewardship of the environment will persist to be ineffective and inequitable, with little possibility of finding a pathway toward sustainability. Consequently, national governments, civil society groups, and experts on global environment policy have called for the reform of the global environmental governance structure. This paper reviews the most prominent policy options for environmental governance reform that have received attention in the literature, and identifies key points of contention and convergence. To achieve its aim, the paper is divided as follows: introduction, core issues of debate on the need for a World Environment Organization, models of global environmental governance reform, arguments against a World Environment Organization and the concluding remark.

Governing climate change for sustainable food production: A case study of emerging markets

This article addresses three research questions: How does climate change impact food production? What are the governance challenges associated with managing such impacts? What are the conditions for future success in managing the impacts of climate change on food production? To answer these questions, the researcher undertook a document review and analysis to address these various aspects with a major focus on East Africa. The study finds that climate change affects food production largely through its physical impacts on precipitation and increased the frequency of extreme weather events. Within a context of weak governance; climate change further challenges governance institutional structures and mechanisms. The study concludes that specific aspects of the prevailing climate change governance regime require major reforms (particularly the role of the state, corporations and civil society) while other climate governance mechanisms need to be completely overhauled (for example through establishment of a new World Environment Organization).

Post-Paris Climate Agreement UNFCCC COP-21: Perspectives on International Environmental Governance

This contribution presents a number of key assets on the road to a renewable energy global economy. Among these are science, technology innovation and green investment. The Paris Climate Agreement is also presented as a normative framework asset but the deal failed to establish measureable targets to follow up progress throughout its implementation process. This research points out the fact that such a failure is common to most environmental international instruments. The UNFCCC 21st COP which adopted the Paris Climate Agreement is indeed a demonstration once again of the incapacity of the COP mechanism to adopt suitable institutional arrangements to build up sustainability and resilience. It is suggested, however, that this very fact should raise among nations a collective conscience regarding the inadequacies of the current environmental institutions and forums. The international community is invited to seek a strong specialised institution with organisational status within the United Nations system to adopt decisions, environmental standards and sustainability indicators and to implement these autonomously for the sake of the preservation of life on earth for generations to come. To this end, this article shares the solution of resuming and concluding previous consultations and negotiations on reform of the international environmental governance within the United Nations system aiming at the creation of a World Environmental Organisation (WEO).

واقع استخدام أسلوب تحليل التباين في بحوث الباحثين المحترفين المنشورة في المجلات العلمية في بعض الجامعات السعودية : دراسة تقويمية

الحوكمة البيئية العالمية | التنوع المؤسساتي | منظومة الأمم المتحدة البيئية | الإصلاح | منظمة البيئة العالمية | Global Environmental Governance | Institutional Multiplicity | United Nations Environmental System | Reform | World Environment Organization

Change in Global Environmental Governance

Where does change come from in the architecture of global environmental governance? To the extent that a traditional answer to this question exists, it is that states self-consciously make changes in the architecture, to meet specific cooperative goals and in response to new information about the state of the natural environment. This is the classical neoliberal, institutionalist, regime theory answer: States, understood as rational unitary actors, create new institutions to reduce the market imperfections in international cooperation. This answer has informed much good work on global environmental politics over the past two decades, but it is limited by its terms of reference. States are often neither rational nor unitary, and they are not the only actors of relevance to global environmental governance. A more recent counter-narrative to state-based regime theory abjures the state and the formal intergovernmental organizations created by states, looking both to other levels of government and to nongovernmental actors as sources of environmental governance. This approach looks at networks of nonstate actors as the source of voluntary global environmental leadership, built up from the grass roots rather than imposed from the top. This is a useful corrective to an exclusive focus on the state as the unit of analysis, and on conscious design rather

United We Stand, Divided We Fall: The Case for a World Environment Organization

United We Stand, Divided We Fall: The Case for a World Environment Organization

L'Atlas des Utopies. 200 Cartes. 25 Siècles d'Histoire

L'Atlas des Utopies. 200 Cartes. 25 Siècles d'Histoire

Environmental Governance and Sustainability

Contents: Introduction: The Scholarship of Environmental Governance PART I: THE ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN OF ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE 1. Instruments for Environmental Governance: What Works? Michael G. Faure 2. Does (Property) Diversity Beget (Landscape) Sustainability? John Page and Ann Brower 3. Creating Next Generation Rural Landscape Governance: The Challenge for Environmental Law Scholarship Paul Martin, Jacqueline Williams and Amanda Kennedy PART II: GOVERNANCE INNOVATION IN CHINA 4. Constitutionalism and the Environment: The Evolution of Environmental Governance in China's Socialist Market Economy Kishan Khoday 5. Toward a More Effective Environmental Criminal Law in China Michael G. Faure and Hao Zhang 6. A Feasible Approach to Environmental Public Interest Litigation: The People's Procuratorate as Plaintiff Mei Hong and Yin Yanjie 7. Environmental E-governance in China: Insights from Government-citizen Interaction Qin Tianbao and Wang Huanhuan PART III: THE INTERSECTION OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIAL JUSTICE AROUND WATER LAWS 8. Global Climate Disruption and Water Law Reform in the United States Joseph W. Dellapenna 9. The Legal Protection of Ramsar Wetlands: Australian Reforms Alex Gardner 10. Drinking Water Security in China: A Critical Justice Issue Ke Jian PART IV: LINKING LOCAL AND INTERNATIONAL LEGAL INNOVATIONS 11. The Quest for a World Environment Organization: Reflections on a Failing Debate as an Input for Future Improvement Nils Goeteyn and Frank Maes 12. Human Rights Law, Refugee and Migration Law, and Environmental Law: Exploring their Contributions in the Context of `Environmental Migration' Michele Morel 13. Climate Change: Legal Impediments to Technology Transfer Zhou Chen 14. Implementing Stewardship in Kenyan Land Use Law: The Case for a Sustainability Extension Robert Kibugi Index

Greening the United Nations Charter: World Politics in the Anthropocene

A revised version of this working paper has been published as: Biermann, Frank. 2012. Greening the United Nations Charter: World Politics in the Anthropocene. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development. May / June 2012. A constitutional turn is needed to bring the UN system in line with the urgent needs of planetary stewardship and earth system governance in the 21st century. Yet how this could be organized in practice remains a challenge and subject to political and scholarly debate. This paper contributes to this debate by outlining four reforms of the UN system that would advance global decision-making by addressing major shortcomings in the current system: Lack of integration of economic and environmental policies in the UN system; institutional fragmentation and weakness of the environmental pillar of sustainable development; lack of high-level regulatory competence and oversight regarding areas beyond national jurisdiction; and insufficient integration of scientific insights into political decision-making. The reforms proposed would together create an Earth Alliance in the UN system, consisting of a high-level UN Sustainable Development Council, a World Environment Organization, a UN Trusteeship Council for Areas beyond National Jurisdiction, and an UN Global Environmental Assessment Commission.

Institutional design and UNEP reform: historical insights on form, function and financing

The global environmental governance architecture is set to undergo major reforms, with the main decisions on reform to be taken at the June 2012 Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development. Discussions on reform have focused on whether the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) should retain its institutional status as a subsidiary body of the UN General Assembly, or be transformed into a specialized agency—a World Environment Organization—of the UN. The choice of institutional form, however, cannot be made without reference to both the needs of global environmental governance, and the factors impeding the effectiveness of the current governance architecture. This article takes a historical perspective, highlighting the similarity between the current debate on institutional form, function and financing; and the choices that the original designers of the governance architecture made 40 years ago. The fundamental global environmental problems and the functions of effective global environmental governance, though evolving, have remained largely unchanged. The historical reasons for creating UNEP as it is currently formed thus remain valid today, and provide useful analytical input to the current debate. This article further argues that the reasons for UNEP's shortcomings have little inherent connection to its institutional form, and cannot be resolved simply by a change in status. Deeper, yet probably easier to accomplish, reforms should focus on enabling UNEP to fulfill its intended role as an effective anchor institution for the global environmental governance architecture.

Of laws and limits: An ecological economic perspective on redressing the failure of contemporary global environmental governance

The persistent failures of international environmental governance initiatives to halt the degradation of the global commons are directly linked to the implicit worldview and assumptions fueling the proliferation of industrial society. These include an instrumental conception on non-human nature, rampant materialism, technological optimism, and an expansionary economics premised on the axiomatic necessity of unconstrained growth. Permeating contemporary environmental governance regimes, it is argued that these premises are fundamentally incompatible with the requirements of environmental sustainability. Proceeding from the perspective of ecological economics, it is further argued that achieving environmental sustainability in industrial society requires foremost that we restructure and constrain the scale of economic activities relative to global biocapacity. It is concluded that a scale-based approach to governing the environmental commons, operationalized by a strong world environment organization, offers at least a partial solution to this conundrum.

INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE REFORM WITHIN THE UNITED NATIONS: SEEKING MORE SUSTAINABILITY TOWARDS AND BEYOND RIO + 20 EARTH ENVIRONMENT SUMMIT

The International Environmental Governance reform expected soon within the United Nations system is the main point of the 2012 Rio + 20 Summit Agenda. The challenge, as currently presented by the Consultative Group of Ministers on IEG, is to lay down the foundation leading to the establishment of a World Environment Organization able to produce efficiency in the coordination of the multitude of agencies which now belong to UNEP. This paper acknowledges the achievements of the Consultative Group of Ministers. It aims however to show that such an administrative reform may be able to improve IEG in terms of administration efficiency and accountability but has unfortunately a very limited effect in ensuring enough sustainability towards and beyond Rio + 20. It is therefore suggested the creation of a WEO with two key bodies able to bring in more sustainability. The first body is the WEO Scientific Body. Its mandate will be to measure and adopt sustainable standards, rates and limits of production or emission, methodologies and harmonization of methodologies on risks assessment and management, and any kind of sustainable indicators. The second is the WEO Disputes Settlement Body with a mission of implementing and applying the sustainable indicators measured and adopted by the WEO Scientific Body. This contribution to IEG improvement for more sustainability came to the conclusion that there are enough suitable conditions gathered and assets under UN current scientific activities for these changes to take place. It is therefore on the basis of such a potential to ensure more sustainability at the coming global environmental governance reform that this contribution calls for the political goodwill which is here presented as the main asset of sustainability in IEG.

Environmental policy integration and the architecture of global environmental governance

This article discusses environmental policy integration—a concept so far mainly applied to domestic and European politics—at the global level. The article distinguishes between integration of institutions, of organizations, and of their bureaucracies, and it addresses both internal integration (within the environmental policy domain) and external integration (between environmental policies and non-environmental policies). The overall focus is on one set of policy reform proposals that have been salient in the global environmental governance debate for the last decades: the question of whether the creation of a world environment organization would improve the effectiveness, legitimacy, and efficiency of global environmental governance. We revisit this debate and explore the options for organizational change, including clustering, upgrading, streamlining, and hierarchical steering, with a focus on whether the reform proposals can bring about environmental policy integration. We conclude that in the longer term, upgrading of the UN Environment Programme to a UN specialized agency, with additional and increasing streamlining of other institutions and bureaucracies, offers the most potential for environmental policy integration and does not appear to be unrealistic.

Climate Change: Governance Challenges for Copenhagen

Climate change has been described as diabolical policy problem ... harder than any other issue of high importance that has come before our polity in living memory. (1) To deal with it effectively involves many different policy areas. These include not only the obvious ones like energy, but also others such as macroeconomic and fiscal policy, food security, health, water, trade, biodiversity, and even immigration. The financial implications of climate change--impacts, adaptation, and mitigation--are huge and growing. There is a need for massive deployment of technology, a sector notoriously difficult to regulate. Climate change also involves time frames unknown in public policy. There is currently no overall governance arrangement to integrate all these dimensions. The Bonn-based UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) secretariat, with its mandate defined by the existing convention and the Kyoto Protocol, can easily be seen as too narrow in scope and expertise, and too small to cope with the scale and complexity of this global challenge. It is often pointed out that the international institutional framework is sectorally based, whereas climate change is inherently a cross-sectoral issue. Another weakness is that the Annex I/non-Annex I distinction on which the convention, the protocol, and, to a large extent, the negotiations under the Bali Road Map are based has outlived its usefulness. The Bali Road Map negotiations have softened this distinction a little by referring to developed and developing countries, but even this cannot adequately reflect the range of responsibilities and capabilities among countries. By 2050, the horizon we need to work toward if the world is to come to grips with global warming forty-two years after the start of the Kyoto Protocol's first commitment period, the evolution of the world's major economies will have rendered these dualities irrelevant. There is also much concern about the lack of effectiveness and efficiency of some of the existing institutions, as can be seen by the criticism directed at the Global Environment Facility (GEF) by developing countries, and by concerns about aspects of the Clean Development Mechanism, which had been voiced in the negotiations. If new institutions were to be formed, therefore, they almost certainly would not replicate the current arrangements. Indeed, the same could be said of sustainable development in general; (2) advocacy of new and stronger governance arrangements is widespread, with some opinion favoring a new world environment organization under UN auspices as the way forward. The core challenge of mitigation, or emissions reduction, would ideally be addressed first by the small number of countries that represent 80 percent of global emissions, represented in the Major Economies Forum (MEF), a sort of climate G-20, rather than through the UN process where close to 200 countries need to be corralled into agreement. After all, the action taken by fewer than twenty countries will determine whether or not global greenhouse gas concentrations can be limited to 450 parts per million [CO.sub.2] equivalent or lower, so that there is an even chance of limiting global warming to 2 degrees above preindustrial levels. The G8 has given useful impetus to global action on climate change, but its role is limited because it is not sufficiently representative of the developing economies. If the MEF did not already exist, inevitably a similar grouping would have emerged sooner or later. This is not to say that a MEF-brokered agreement on reducing global emissions would be enough in itself. The small, the poor, and the vulnerable, who represent numerically by far the largest number of countries, are in a position to demand that their needs be catered to in any future climate agreement. In particular, no agreement can afford to overlook a large-scale response on adaptation for these countries that have contributed little to global emissions and now find themselves at the forefront of expected impacts of climate change. …

Book Review: A World Environment Organization: Solution or Threat for Effective International Environmental Governance

Book Review: A World Environment Organization: Solution or Threat for Effective International Environmental Governance

Frank Biermann and Steffen Bauer (eds): A world environmental organization: solutions or threat for effective international environmental governance?

Frank Biermann and Steffen Bauer (eds): A world environmental organization: solutions or threat for effective international environmental governance?

A World Environment Organization: Solution or Threat for Effective International Environmental Governance by Frank Biermann and Steffen Bauer

A World Environment Organization: Solution or Threat for Effective International Environmental Governance by Frank Biermann and Steffen Bauer

Book Review: A World Environment Organization. Solution or Threat for Effective International Environmental Governance?

Biermann, Frank and Bauer, Steffen (Eds). A World Environment Organization. Solution or Threat for Effective International Environmental Governance? Ashgate, 2005. 280pp. ISBN 0-7546-3765-4.

Private vs. public regulation: political economy of the international environment

Minimum standards set by a ‘World Environmental Organization’ (WEO) and NGO labelling are promoted as alternative approaches to international environmental protection. We explore the potential inter-play between these two approaches when the WEO is subject to pressure from producers. We find that if WEO and NGO schemes are mutually exclusive then the existence of an NGO ‘alternative’ increases industry resistance to WEO proposals and this may reduce welfare. If, however, the schemes are run in parallel, existence of the NGO lessens producer opposition to WEO activities. This allows the WEO to be ‘bolder’ in its proposals, which is good for welfare.