Foreign Policy In Focus Special Report: Global Environmental Protection in the 21st Century

Improving the UN Architecture

No single institution legislates or manages international environmental problems. Scores of official and semiofficial organizations and agencies have at least some environmental mandate. In the future, global environmental governance will continue to involve an array of multilateral, national, and intergovernmental organizations together with citizen groups and treaties. This is as it should be, given that the concept of sustainable development embraces so many different disciplines and issues. But as Professor Dan Esty, a leading international environmental lawyer, has observed: "The difficulty with existing international institutions that address environmental issues . . . is that they have been given narrow mandates, small budgets and limited support. No one organization has the authority or political strength to serve as a central clearinghouse or coordinator."⁴

The UN Environment Program (UNEP) is widely considered the primary international environmental agency. Its mission is to "facilitate international cooperation in the environmental field; to keep the world environmental situation under review so that problems of international significance receive appropriate consideration by governments; and to promote the acquisition, assessment, and exchange of environmental knowledge."⁵ In recent years, financial and political support of UNEP has lagged, and most observers question whether it can effectively champion environmental issues within the UN system.

Global Population: 1999
Region	Population (millions)

World	5,982
Total Africa	771
Northern Africa	170
Western Africa	223
Eastern Africa	235
Middle Africa	94
Southern Africa	49
Total North America	304
United States	273
Canada	31
Total Latin America and Caribbean	512
Central America¹	¹³⁵
^Caribbean	³⁷
^{South America}	³³⁹
^{Total Asia}	^3,637
^{Asia excluding China}	^2,383
^{Western Asia}	¹⁸⁶
^{South Central Asia}	^1,451
^{South East Asia}	⁵²⁰
^{East Asia}	^1,481
^{Total Europe}	⁷²⁸
^{Northern Europe}	⁹⁵
^{Western Europe}	¹⁸³
^{Eastern Europe}	³⁰⁶
^{Southern Europe}	¹⁴⁵
^{Total Oceania}	³⁰
^{1Central America includes Mexico.}
^{Source: Carl Haub and Diana Cornelius, 1999 World Population Data Sheet (Washington DC: Population Reference Bureau, 1999). Summary available on the internet at http://www.prb.org/pubs/wpds99/wpds99a.htm.}

Partly in response to UNEP’s weaknesses and partly because of the many different international institutions that exercise at least some environmental authority, governments created the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) at the 1992 Earth Summit to coordinate and integrate environmental and economic issues within the United Nations. Unfortunately the CSD’s role is limited to providing a political forum for discussion, without any operational mandate or authority. The result is that international environmental governance is still spread across too many institutions with diffuse, conflicting, or weak authorities.

Given these problems in the UN architecture for international environmental governance, there may be no escaping the need for broad institutional reform. Several important leaders have called for such reform. In a 1997 speech to the UN General Assembly, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl suggested amending the UN Charter to include sustainable development as one of the two overall purposes of the UN and to establish a global environmental umbrella organization, with UNEP as a major pillar. In addition, Brazil, South Africa, Singapore, and New Zealand have also proposed a new, stronger UN environmental body.

Other specific proposals have been advanced, including the creation of an environmental organization with powers analogous to that of the World Trade Organization. Such an organization could consolidate the different environmental secretariats and UNEP, creating one organization responsible for ensuring the implementation and enforcement of environmental treaties. If a binding set of principles existed, a World Environmental Organization could also resolve environmental disputes more efficiently than can the current processes.

Less ambitious, and perhaps more realistic in the short term, would be to strengthen the growing number of regional environmental institutions that are being established to manage shared natural resources. For example, the International Joint Commission between the U.S. and Canada, which primarily aims at managing the Great Lakes, has been highly regarded as a model for the environmental management of shared watersheds. Regional fisheries management organizations are also emerging in many areas of the world and have been given potentially strong enforcement powers under recently negotiated global fisheries agreements.

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