Branches of international environmental law - Introduction to International Environmental Law - page 142

administrative system that controls the transport of waste for processing abroad.
All these means of reducing and controlling waste are regulated by different
agreements between various countries. Waste also includes hazardous chemicals
which fall under the rules targeted at eliminating the production and use of the
most hazardous chemicals and at controlling their export and import.
Although the rules related to waste can be compiled as a separate chapter in a
textbook, we cannot say that there has been a systematic attempt to resolve this
environmental problem. The chapter on the waste problem in Sands' textbook,
for example, exposes the incoherence of waste regulation and reveals the prob-
lems in international regulation - hopefully helping future decision-makers unify
the means to address the global waste problem.
Marine environmental protection
Marine environmental protection is the branch of international environmental
law that can most distinctively be considered as a whole. This is because, fi rst,
the entry into force of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1994
(UNCLOS) established the fundamental rules of who has jurisdiction in differ-
ent marine areas and how various marine activities should be carried out.
Another reason behind the coherence of the marine protection regulation is
that the UNCLOS included a whole section, Part XII, devoted to the general
rules and principles that apply to the protection of the marine environment.
The sea, on the whole, has always been international. For this reason, inter-
national law has played a much stronger role in the regulation of oceans than
over land. The marine environment is being rapidly contaminated. The UN
2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) made the following conclu-
sion: 'The ecosystems and biomes that have been most signifi cantly altered
globally by human activity include marine and freshwater ecosystems.' 1
The 'Pacifi c trash vortex' is a fl oating area, twice the size of Hawaii (estimates
as to its exact size depend on what one considers as trash). It traps fl oating trash
that drifts from the coasts, primarily plastic. Imagine: an enormous area of waste
fl oating in the middle of the Pacifi c Ocean.
The Baltic Sea has a long history of contamination. The nine coastal states
bordering on it are discharging nutrients (nitrates and phosphates) into the Baltic
Sea. These nutrients can cause eutrophication: plants and algae have more nutri-
ents, they multiply more rapidly and grow into the vast algal masses we have
seen on TV; they cause cloudiness of water, slime build-up on the shores, and
depletion of oxygen in the seabed. Nutrients fl ow into the Baltic Sea from the
waste waters of communities and industry and with the nitrogen in the atmo-
sphere but, above all, from agriculture (as nutrients from chemical fertilizers and
manure fl ow from the fi elds).