Basic issues in international environmental law - Introduction to International Environmental Law - page 5

new challenges. While the action against climate change is certainly not before
time, it does at least demonstrate that the international community is trying to
do something about what is a massive environmental problem.
Factors affecting the development of international environmental law
To understand why a certain environmental regime was negotiated, or why it
is in a state of change, we need fi rst to understand the decisive factors in inter-
national environmental policy and law.
Science is an essential factor in international environmental law, much
more so than in other branches of international law. Scientifi c understanding
and knowledge are constantly changing, and this affects international environ-
mental regimes in many ways. A good example of the changes in science is the
concept of the 'ecosystem', a fairly novel concept that evolved gradually in the
scientifi c literature of the 1930s. 7 An ecosystem refers to a functioning regional
community of living organisms and non-living environmental factors.
It was long thought that ecosystems had an equilibrium that could be upset
through pollution caused by humans: if the pollution ceased, it was thought
that the ecosystem would recover its original equilibrium. We now understand
that the ecosystems themselves experience great changes - even without human
infl uence. This is why the concept of adaptive management is becoming
prevalent in environmental governance; it is a model to adapt decision-making
so that the dynamic change in ecosystems is taken into account.
International environmental regimes are largely based on such an adaptive
management model. For example, many fi sh resource management regimes have
been infl uenced by what we have learned about ecosystems. While the renewal
of fi sh from one year to another was previously established by researching the
extent of a species in a certain area, fi sh are now understood to be just one part
of a wider ecosystem. The replenishment of fi sh stocks should, then, take into
account the well-being of the entire ecosystem, of which the fi sh are just one part.
Science can also have a much more direct impact on how international
environmental regimes develop. For example, in the ozone regime, science bore
a direct infl uence on the decisions the parties made to restore the ozone layer.
The climate regime unfortunately lacks a similar direct infl uence, because states
negotiate the wording of popular reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), which are made for decision-makers. Although these
summaries are based on scientifi c data compiled by the IPCC, the summaries
provide opportunities to water down scientifi c results, and are often the only
sources the decision-makers have access to or the time to read.
Dedicated interest groups have different ways of infl uencing our under-
standing of environmental problems, and they have the means of lobbying states
to act for or against the cause of environmental protection. For example, in 1988,
the Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities 8
was negotiated to permit mining in Antarctica, with stringent environmental
regulations, but partly as a result of lobbying by Greenpeace, two key states