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This introductory chapter discusses the Gaia hypothesis as well as two other competing hypotheses. Gaia, the idea that life moderates the global environment to make it more favorable for life, was first introduced in 1972 in an academic paper by James Lovelock titled “Gaia as Seen through the Atmosphere.” The Gaia hypothesis proposes planetary regulation by and for the biota, where the “biota” is the collection of all life. Lovelock suggests that life has had a hand on the tiller of environmental control, and the intervention of life in the regulation of the planet has been such as to promote stability and keep conditions comfortable. The chapter then looks at the geological hypothesis, which suggests that the nature of the Earth's environment is principally determined by a mixture of geological forces and astronomical processes, and the coevolutionary hypothesis, which asserts that life has had an enormous impact on the planetary environment.

This chapter examines why states decided to delegate key monitoring tasks to private actors in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol. It first provides an overview of the origins of the CDM before discussing the involvement of the Global Environment Facility, the World Bank, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat, and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in the CDM. It also presents three reasons behind delegated authority in the CDM, and specifically why private actors were selected to serve as the “atmospheric police” of the CDM. First, the private sector had relatively long-standing experience in the intricacies of measuring carbon offsets. Second, powerful states agreed that this market mechanism should be part of the Protocol, and that a third-party verifier was needed to monitor the quality of offset projects. Finally, there was a focal institution, the CDM Executive Board, to screen and oversee agents.

This chapter focuses on internally generated changes due to evolutionary inventions of new forms life. These evolutionary inventions include the evolution of oxygen-yielding photosynthesis and the colonization of land by the first forests. Oxygen-dependent photosynthesis and respiration evolved to take advantage of the appearance of oxygen in the biosphere, while anaerobes crashed from preeminence to relative obscurity. Meanwhile, land plants evolved to adapt to the low carbon dioxide and low temperatures that earlier generations had produced, and enormous insects thrived temporarily to take advantage of the transiently abundant oxygen, only to disappear again when oxygen levels subsequently subsided. Eventually, new types of fungi evolved to make use of the new food source. Ultimately, these internally generated events produced some changes that generally improved the global environment for life, but also some that tended to spoil it.

After more than 20 years, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC) still stands as a massive achievement in the history of codification efforts in international law. This chapter examines the role of the World Bank (WB) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the fund for which it acts both as trustee and as one of the three implementing agencies. The implementation role the LOSC itself seems to envisage for the WB, and the way this has been supplemented by the 1995 UN Fish Stocks Agreement (UNFSA), are discussed. The role and financing capability of the WB itself are also considered, along with the establishment, restructuring, and evolution of the GEF, and the role of international organisations in developing and implementing the LOSC. The chapter concludes by looking at a representative spread of the growing portfolio of projects of both the WB and GEF in the law of the sea area, including marine pollution control and fisheries management.

Created one year before the 1992 Rio summit, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) is mandated to fund projects designed to promote global environmental protection. In 1994, it was restructured in response to strong criticism from nongovernmental organizations and developing countries, and today, has a unique institutional structure that includes a small secretariat headquartered in Washington, DC. This chapter examines the autonomous influence of the GEF secretariat as a bureaucracy and the factors underlying such influence. After providing an overview of the GEF secretariat’s organizational structure and activities, the chapter analyzes its cognitive, normative, and executive influences. It also discusses the secretariat’s resources, competences, and embeddedness, along with its organizational expertise, organizational culture, and organizational leadership.

As the years go by, the future of the global environment becomes more affected by policy choices that China is making regarding its economy, use of energy, and atmospheric environment. However intractable China's atmospheric environmental challenges seem, its government deserves credit for trying energetically to respond over the last decade. However, the program pursued by the Chinese government has produced mixed results. This chapter analyses these results and states that these successes and failures must be understood in a broader context. The chapter states the goals of this book: the first is to develop a rigorous framework for integrated analyses of national emission control policies that recognizes the main elements of this complex web; the second is to apply this framework to evaluation of two sets of national emission control policies, one concerning the recent past and the other the near future.

In the unsettled years of the 1990s, values and commitments that had retreated into the background in the previous decade emerged again, reframed and reconfigured for an era of economic uncertainty and global environmental challenges. Attempts to rearticulate priorities in the age of the global environment came to link waste consciousness and environmental consciousness, which together became established and widespread norms. Even as waste and wastefulness were not seen in fundamentally different ways, they took on new meanings and additional purposes as waste consciousness came to be understood in somewhat more global and somewhat less anthropocentric terms.

This chapter presents a personal history of tackling the Gaia theory, and presents its premises and conclusions. According to this chapter, the relatively steady states in the global environment are simply the expected, natural results of a system containing chemical reactions, many of which involve life. The chapter further suggests that the global environment is, in essence, a wasteworld—a system of by-products and their effects. Add life to this wasteworld and it creates a complexly structured dynamical system, because life is not passive in nature. Organisms make metabolic products aimed to ensure their success at living and reproducing, not at transforming or controlling the global environment. However, in making these products, organisms also produce by-products, which lead to large-scale environmental side effects. The environmental consequences of the by-products are inadvertent but do create a system with evolutionary and population feedbacks.

Ozone in the stratosphere shields the Earth from ultraviolet radiation. Worries about the possible depletion of this protective layer led, in the early 1980s, to international attempts to control chlorofluorocarbons, the manmade chemicals thought to be responsible. But it took the dramatic discovery of the Antarctic “ozone hole,” in 1985, to show that humans really were modifying the global environment. The resulting international agreements have put the atmosphere on the road to recovery and provide a model for environmental stewardship. The discovery of the ozone hole gave a huge jolt to the field. Dynamicists thought it might be the result of ozone-poor air flowing upward from the lower atmosphere. The ozone hole was the first clear evidence that man could damage the global environment, but it also provided the first case of concerted international action to counteract such an effect. Its story provides both a cautionary tale and a guiding light for the future, when other environmental threats to the planet will have to be faced by humanity as a whole.

This chapter begins with the rise of climate science, takes us to the enthusiasm and energy of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, and culminates in the debacle of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. Like other sciences, climate science developed incrementally. By the 1950s climate change was being discussed in the popular press. By 1965 it had been mentioned by the President of the United States. In 1988 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established to provide objective information about climate change to decision-makers around the world. In 1992 the largest gathering of heads of state ever assembled met at the Rio Earth Summit. The Rio dream was that the countries of the North and South would join hands to protect the global environment and lift up the world’s poor. At Copenhagen in 2009 it became clear that the dream was over.

The growing body of international environmental law has not been successful in addressing the ecological challenges affecting our planet according to the Global Environment Outlook-6. We are not making enough progress to address environmental problems in such a manner that we can achieve the sustainable development goals by 2030 or achieve some degree of sustainable development by 2050. This chapter reviews the latest science on environmental issues and draws five lessons: First, incremental hard law is unable to pre-empt tomorrow’s problems, let alone address yesterday’s challenges. Second, international environmental law needs to make a quantum jump in terms of understanding of the issues and identification of appropriate tools—and this requires the legal community to engage more proactively with scholars from other disciplines. Third, international environmental law must address the drivers of environmental destruction. Fourth, it needs to engage more proactively with the growing pollution caused by the rich and the growing vulnerability of the poor to the impacts. Finally, principles of environmental justice may need to be incorporated in a possible Global Constitution if we are to live peacefully within a world of resource limits.

Biodiversity, a property of natural areas, provides a range of benefits to the economy including bio-prospecting rents, knowledge and insurance, ecotourism fees, and ecosystem services. Many of these values can be broken out in the System of National Accounts (SNA), leading to better estimates of the economic losses when natural areas are degraded or destroyed. Developing countries harbour the great majority of biodiversity, and this diversity provides benefits, including knowledge and carbon sequestration, to the whole world. However, protecting biodiversity is particularly costly for developing countries: the opportunity cost of forgoing development of natural areas exceeds 1% of GDP in fifty-eight developing countries, versus only four OECD countries. The Global Environment Facility (GEF) can offset these costs through grant finance, but annual GEF finance and co-finance averages only 8% of the opportunity costs faced by low-income countries.