The history of international environmental law - Introduction to International Environmental Law - page 26

Countries (OPEC) caused a worldwide panic by refusing to transport oil to
Western states whose economies were fundamentally dependent upon it.
Several international environmental agreements were concluded between
the late 1960s and the late 1970s in which the developing countries played no
signifi cant role in negotiations. However, these developing nations did play an
active part in the negotiations for the 'constitution of the oceans' - the UN
Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) - between 1973 and 1982.
The negotiation process was probably the most ambitious that the interna-
tional community has ever attempted. Part XII of the Convention concerns
the protection of the marine environment and is still the only global agree-
ment that concentrates on the environment of 70 per cent of the Earth's
surface. Part XII is intended to defi ne how operations that threaten the maritime
environment could be conducted in a sustainable way. The UNCLOS also
specifi cally considers the interests and concerns of developing countries.
The emergence of multilateral environmental protection
Various sporadic multilateral agreements - also in the realm of environmental
protection - were concluded before the UN Conference on the Human
Environment in Stockholm in 1972, but it can be argued that the Stockholm
Conference was the fi rst to join together existing and planned international
environmental regulatory processes under one umbrella with its declaration
and action plan. The establishment of the UN Environment Programme
(UNEP) made it possible to organize international environmental regulation
into a dedicated separate stream from the institutional perspective as well.
It was only after the Stockholm Conference, in the mid-1970s, that the fi rst
textbooks in international environmental law, in Spanish and in English, began
to appear. These textbooks had a signifi cant impact in terms of simplifying a
complex reality: the fi rst step in distinguishing international environmental law
from general international law as an academic discipline.
Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, several multilateral environ-
mental agreements were negotiated. Nuclear power was considered a prob-
lematic source of energy from a very early stage. Even with the utmost
diligence, nuclear disasters can still happen, as the Fukushima power plant
disaster demonstrated in 2011. As early as 1960, the members of the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) agreed
a regional convention on nuclear liability. 5 In 1963, the Vienna Convention
on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage was agreed under the auspices of the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 6 and in 1971, the International
Maritime Organization (IMO) adopted the Convention relating to Civil
Liability in the Field of Maritime Carriage of Nuclear Material 7 (the
Convention entered into force 20 years later in 1991).
At the time, the primary focus was on the development of marine environ-
mental law, both regionally (the Baltic Marine Environment Protection
Convention in 1974, for example) and above all globally. This period culminated