Basic issues in international environmental law - Introduction to International Environmental Law - page 9

signifi cant infl uence over government representatives in the way regulations
are developed on the basis of the latest environmental research. Environmental
organizations have many strategies to infl uence the values and information
base of the representatives of governments. The central organizations of busi-
ness and industry often attempt to counter the arguments of these environ-
mental organizations, turning the discourse towards the economic consequences
of regulation, the country's competitive strength and possible job losses, for
example. The secretariats of international environmental agreements for their
part can infl uence what issues come under discussion and how, as they set the
agenda and draft the preliminary texts of each environmental treaty.
Although the representatives of governments are the ones who formally
make the decisions in environmental treaty negotiations and the agreements
are usually ratifi ed by national systems, there are in fact a large number of
actors contributing towards the contents of environmental treaties.
How can small non-governmental actors influence
global environmental negotiations?
Cooperation in Arctic environmental protection was initiated in 1991 with the
Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS), which later evolved into the
Arctic Council. The Arctic Council is a soft-law cooperative body made up of
the governments of eight Arctic states (fi ve Nordic states, Russia, Canada and
the USA). Indigenous groups have a unique status in the Arctic Council: they
are permanent participants, and must be consulted by the Arctic states in all
decision-making. Arctic cooperation concentrated from the start on producing
information about the threats posed to vulnerable ecosystems mostly by long-
range transboundary pollution.
A working group of the Arctic Council, the Arctic Monitoring and Assess-
ment Programme (AMAP), showed in its 1997 assessment that persistent organic
pollutants or POP compounds end up in the Arctic due to the so-called 'grass-
hopper effect'. These harmful compounds are especially detrimental to the
indigenous peoples in the Arctic, whose traditional food sources comprise some
of the most seriously contaminated animals (see Chapter 4 , 'Long-range trans-
boundary air pollution', p. 113).
It was interesting to see the creative impact of the coalition between indigenous
groups and the scientifi c community at the global 2001 Stockholm Convention
on POPs. Scientifi c assessments on environmental problems in the abstract are
often insuffi cient and it often requires an explicit link to the human consequences
for people to absorb the true impact. For example, ozone depletion became a
much more acute environmental problem once it had been concretely proven
that it was one of the causes of skin cancer in humans. AMAP scientifi c assess-
ments on the danger to the Arctic and its indigenous peoples from POPs alone
might not have been suffi cient to have infl uenced governments' representatives
were it not for the activism of the indigenous peoples most at risk.
It was therefore important that the Arctic indigenous peoples actively com-
municated the AMAP group's fi ndings to the representatives in the negotiations.