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While it has been universally recognized that pollution from land-based sources presents the most serious threat to the marine environment, there has been no consensus on the most effective means of combating the threat. Nor has there been a clear will on the part of states, collectively or individually, to take effective measures to deal with the problem. This chapter begins with a historical review of international efforts to tackle the problem of marine pollution from land-based sources. It then discusses efforts to develop a ‘global’ legal instrument.

This chapter examines the relationship between environmental damage and pollution in the marine sphere. It begins by tracing the evolution of the legal definition of marine pollution from its scientific origins. It then examines various examples of this definition to understand their implications for the legal definition of marine environmental damage. It presents a case study of marine pollution laws in Malaysia and Singapore to illustrate how the concepts of marine pollution and marine environmental damage are interpreted and applied to these two nations.

This chapter discusses environmental claims over the exclusive economic zone (EEZ). The assertion of excessive coastal state or international environmental regulation in the EEZ poses the third of the three major legal and policy threats to the stability of the regime. The EEZ framework is under pressure from a coordinated effort by certain government agencies, coastal states, and international and nongovernmental organizations, to promote a regime of controlled access beyond the territorial sea. These efforts are informed by a number of motivations, including flagrant coastal state nativism or jingoism, good faith, and deep concern over maritime environmental degradation, the social-political appeal of certain endangered marine wildlife, deliberate national military strategy, local and tribal or indigenous politics, thinly veiled anti-capitalist and anti-globalist sentiment, and aggressive claims to offshore natural resources. But for many, the coastal state's prerogative in reducing marine pollution is the over-riding drive for greater control over the EEZ.

This chapter traces the evolution of marine environmental protection, with particular reference to the regulation of dumping activities. It poses the fundamental question: in the light of significant developments in global and regional environmental law and policy since 1982, does the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC) continue to play a significant role in the protection and preservation of the marine environment? The LOSC is placed in an intertemporal context, considering the background against which the provisions of Part XII were negotiated. The gaps or lacunae in the LOSC are examined in the context of more closely considering the post-UNCLOS III regulation of dumping activities, and comparing these with the LOSC provisions. The continuing relevance of the LOSC for the protection and preservation of the marine environment is considered. Part XII of the LOSC expressly contemplates the integration of existing marine pollution agreements' rules and standards, and foreshadows their further dynamic development.

Founded in March 1948, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for maritime safety and the prevention of marine pollution from ships. Formerly known as the Inter-Governmental Maritime Consultative Organization, it added marine environment protection to its mandate in 1967, partly in response to the sinking of the Torrey Canyon. This chapter focuses on the work of the IMO secretariat as an international bureaucracy as well as its influence, environmental division, and environmental policy, and argues that the IMO secretariat has made an important contribution to the provision of technical expertise on ship design and construction. After providing an overview of the IMO 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.

Home to 14 of the world’s 20 most water-stressed countries, the Arab region is the most water-scarce region on earth. Due to their vulnerabilities as largely arid desert countries characterized by little or no rainfall, the search for water availability, accessibility, and affordability remains a complex challenge in the Arab world. A number of regional instruments have been adopted to address groundwater depletion and to ensure water quality in seas, oceans, and aquifers. This chapter examines the applicable legal frameworks at international and regional levels that are designed to enhance water quality and quantity, and the state of their implementation in Arab states. First, it unpacks the nature, scale, and drivers of water insecurity in Arab states. It then examines the key features and scope of legislation and institutions designed to regulate water quantity and quality in Arab states, and evaluates the effectiveness and appropriateness of legal responses to substances and actions that affect water quality.

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.

The legal regulation of the offshore abandonment of structures and installations on the continental shelf is determined by international law. Onshore, international law scarcely touches abandonment and reclamation, save that it provides for the international responsibility of a state where its acts — within its own territory and otherwise quite lawful — cause significant harm to others. Further, international law is establishing certain strict liability standards for harm emanating from inherently hazardous activities. Nuclear decommissioning will have to be formulated with these international obligations with the safety of others in view. Offshore, international law has a direct relevance. The most critical and contentious issue has been as to whether offshore structures and installations are to be removed; or whether they may be left fully or partially in situ. Does contemporary international law require total removal? This chapter begins by asking whether Article 5(5) of the Geneva Convention represents a rule of customary international law. This chapter also discusses marine pollution and abandonment, dumping, the impact of abandonment on fisheries, and decommissioning of pipelines.

With the emergence of the concept of community interests, it appears that international law is entering into a new stage of its development. In this regard, an issue arises whether and to what extent international courts and tribunals can respond to the protection of community interests. Provisional measures prescribed by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) for protecting the marine environment provide an important insight into this subject. Thus this contribution examines ITLOS provisional measures in the context of marine environmental protection focusing on three issues: (1) the role of ITLOS provisional measures in the regulation of marine pollution and conservation of marine living resources, (2) the Tribunal’s manner in which the requirements to prescribe provisional measures are examined, and (3) the effectiveness of ITLOS provisional measures.

This chapter summarizes the key points of each chapter and highlights vital lessons learned from reviews and comparative analyses of systems across the globe. It offers general recommendations for ongoing conservation and restoration of seabird islands. It considers how the public’s improved global perspectives on seabird islands are also vulnerable to major global threats, including the impacts of invasive species, climate change, marine pollution, and exploitation of marine and terrestrial resources. It examines the role of seabirds and seabird islands as indicators of global change, and also offers suggestions for future research to continue in building understanding of the ecology of seabird islands.

The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC) is at the centre of a web of international obligations and institutions whose contracting parties do not necessarily coincide. In the field of dispute settlement, the connection between the LOSC and other instruments and obligations is particularly evident. The coexistence of different courts and tribunals is at the heart of the very mechanism for compulsory settlement set out in Section 2 of Part XV. The choice of procedure clause in Article 287 involves the International Court of Justice, an adjudicating body extraneous to the Convention, together with bodies set up under the LOSC, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and arbitral tribunals. There are seven agreements utilising the dispute settlement mechanism of the LOSC, covering issues ranging from fisheries management and conservation, to marine pollution control, conservation of living marine resources, and conservation of underwater cultural heritage.

To talk about technology when exploring the relationship between states and nature may seem paradoxical. The paradoxical nature of this assignment is twofold. First, many argue that to speak of the technological is to speak of the anti-political—here technology is understood not as something of the state, but as an external arena that can simultaneously be used by the government to verify its policies, or, if unchecked, undermine the governing capacities of politicians (Barry 2001: ch. 1). Others claim that technology is the antithesis of nature—if nature is the un-produced eternal substratum of existence, technology is a socio-cultural artefact, a fragment of produced nature and a mechanism for ecological transformation (Luke 1996). Despite this apparent conundrum, this chapter argues that technology provides a crucial basis upon which many of the interplays between the state and nature continue to be expressed. Within his recent book on the links between states, government, and technologies—Political Machines—Andrew Barry (2001: 9) suggests that we need to think of technologies in two related but distinct ways. He argues that our first recourse when considering technologies is often to technological devices—or those labour-saving and labour-enhancing gadgets, tools, instruments, and gizmos that make new socio-economic practices possible and speed-up existing exercises (see also Harvey 2002). Secondly, Barry discerns a broader understanding of technology, which incorporates a wider set of procedures, rules, and calculations in and through which a technological device is animated and put to use. In this chapter we explore the technological devices and supporting technological infrastructures through which the contemporary politics of state– nature relations are being played out. We interpret the role of technology within state–nature relations in two main ways. First, we explore the ways in which various technologies have been synthesized with and within the state apparatuses in order to enhance governments’ capacities to manage nature. The role of technology in facilitating the governance of nature can be conceived of at a number of levels. It can, for example, be related to a Marxist reading of technologies as tools/machines deployed in the physical transformation of the natural world (Harvey 2002: 534).

When members of a society coordinate their activities based on a broadly disseminated and reinforced set of dogmatic beliefs in their mythological or religious traditions, anthropologists refer to these beliefs as useful myths. The aim of this chapter is to reveal that the dogmatic beliefs associated with the construct of the sovereign nation-state are useful myths that can no longer be viewed as useful because they are effectively undermining efforts to resolve the environmental crisis. This situation is greatly complicated by the fact that the sovereign nation-state is a normative construct, or a construct that is assumed to be a taken-for-granted and indelible aspect of geopolitical reality. The large problem here is that this normative construct constitutes one of the greatest conceptual barriers to resolving the environment crisis. This brief account of the origins and transformations of the construct of the sovereign nation-state is intended to accomplish four objectives. The first is to demonstrate that the construct of the sovereign nation-state emerged in Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries in a series of narratives that transferred the God-given power and authority of sovereign monarchs to the states governed by these monarchs. The second is to reveal that the narratives about nationalism and national identity that emerged during and after the Protestant Reformation abused the truths of religion in an effort to convince core populations living within the borders of particular nation-states that they were a chosen people possessing superior cultural values and personal qualities. The third is to show that the dogmatic beliefs legitimated and perpetuated by these narratives eventually resulted in the creation of churches of state with sacred symbols, rites, and rituals similar to those in Protestant and Catholic churches. And the fourth objective is to provide a basis for understanding how these dogmatic beliefs eventually became foundational to a system of international government, the United Nations, predicated on the construct of the sovereign nation-state. The history of this construct is much more complex and far more detailed than the brief account in this chapter suggests.