Next, we will discuss some of the major international environmental agreements. The aim is not to go through all the agreements, as there are hundreds of them, but to highlight the agreements that are central to sustainable development as well as some of the successes that have been achieved on the basis of the agreements.

 

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is trying to stop climate change

As discussed in the first part of the course, the accelerating effects of human activities on climate change have been known for a very long time. However, the first real progress on climate change was only made at the Rio de Janeiro conference in 1992. Before that, in 1988, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) had established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has, among other things, published a number of authoritative assessment reports on climate change.

In 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was signed at Rio. At that time, 154 countries signed this climate treaty, and today there are 197 signatories.

The main decision-making body of the UNFCCC is the annual Conference of the Parties (COP). At the 1997 COP in Kyoto, a target was agreed for developed countries to reduce emissions by an average of 5.2% compared to 1990 levels. The targets of this agreement were met. 

However, after Kyoto, the negotiations became more difficult. At the latest after the 2009 COP in Copenhagen - widely considered a flop - it was realised that a model based on universal binding emission commitments was unlikely to ever succeed in climate policy. There is no mechanism that could force the world's major powers, such as the US, China and Russia, to accept binding commitments that are unpalatable to them.

The current climate agreement in force, the so-called "Paris Agreement", was concluded at the 2015 Conference of the Parties in Paris. It has been described as a major success in a very difficult international climate negotiations. The Paris Agreement is global and legally binding.

Image: The UNFCCC conference in Paris, 2015. (UN Climate Change. Adoption of the Paris Agreement. CC BY 2.0 (Image information References 4.3.).

The Paris Agreement aims to limit the global average temperature increase to well below 2°C. The aim is to keep the increase below 1.5°C (compared to pre-industrial times). The agreement also aims to increase the capacity to adapt to the adverse effects of climate change and to redirect financial flows towards low-carbon and climate-resilient development.

The Paris Agreement marks a new direction in international climate negotiations. The agreement does not commit its parties to any specific emission reduction targets, but obliges countries that have ratified the agreement to establish, communicate and maintain successive Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) that it intends to achieve. Parties undertake to adopt these NDCs every five years, and they must always be more ambitious than the previous targets. 

The Paris Agreement is therefore very different in nature from previous climate and environmental agreements. It is based on targets set by the parties themselves (bottom-up) and does not bind them to any particular means by which emission reductions should be achieved.

What is essential for the Paris Agreement is that all parties continue to tighten their climate policies. However, there is no guarantee that the Paris Agreement will actually work as hoped. The parties to the agreement are driven to meet their targets only by the fear of losing their international reputation (naming & shaming). In order for the 'naming and shaming' mechanism to work, the setting and achievement of national targets must become sufficiently transparent. The effectiveness of such a mechanism based on peer pressure, i.e. shame, depends on the sensitivity of the parties to international reputation loss on the one hand, and on the number of countries that fail to live up to the international expectations on the other - among others, there is less shame in failing. 

In any case, climate policy will have to tighten considerably beyond the current pledges made, which are not sufficient to limit the temperature rise to the 2°C target level of the Paris Agreement, as illustrated in the first part of the course.

 

The UN Convention Biological Diversity (CBD) aims to conserve biodiversity

The most important international agreement to protect biodiversity is the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), signed in Rio in 1992. In addition to protecting biodiversity, the objectives of the CBD are the sustainable use of biodiversity and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from genetic diversity. In 2000, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which regulates the genetic modification of organisms, was also annexed to the Convention.

The treaty has 196 signatories, almost all the countries of the world, including the European Union. The United States is the only UN member state that has not signed the Biodiversity Treaty. Parties to the Convention have committed themselves to taking biodiversity into account in their activities. States are obliged to establish a strategy and action programme for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and to report regularly on their implementation. Parties' commitment to developing strategies varies, as does the level of ambition of the targets.

The implementation of the CBD is monitored by the Conference of the Parties (COP) every two years. The 2010 meeting in Nagoya, Japan, adopted an updated global biodiversity strategy for 2011-2020. The strategy consisted of a vision up to 2050, a mission and twenty so-called Aichi targets. The various targets include raising awareness of biodiversity issues, removing harmful subsidies and reducing pressures on sensitive environments. The vision is to secure the ecosystem services that sustain the planet's vitality and safeguard human well-being through the wise conservation and use of biodiversity. 

In Nagoya, the goal was set to halt the loss of biodiversity by 2020. However, this target has not been met, as the latest global assessment of the state of biodiversity (2020) concludes. Biodiversity is disappearing at an unprecedented rate and there is no sign of a reversal. None of the Aichi targets have been met, and only a few have achieved partial successes. An example of a positive development is the fight against invasive species.

A new "global biodiversity framework" was to be negotiated in Kunming, China, in 2020, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the meeting was postponed and was eventually held in Montreal, Canada, in 2022. The Kunming-Montreal framework continues to pursue the vision of the CBD and includes 23 targets to be achieved by 2030. Significant new targets include bringing at least 30% of degraded terrestrial, inland water, marine and coastal ecosystems under effective restoration, and effectively conserving at least 30% of terrestrial, inland water, coastal and marine areas.

In the European Union, the Biodiversity Convention is implemented through the EU Biodiversity Strategy. A part of this strategy is the EU Nature Restoration Regulation, which was adopted in summer 2024 after a complex series of steps. The Nature Restoration Regulation requires 60% of degraded areas to be restored by 2040 and 90% by 2050. The next step is for Member States to draw up plans to implement restoration. For more information on EU and Finnish nature and environment policies, visit the Ministry of the Environment's website https://ym.fi/en/areas-of-expertise.

It appears that, while progress is being made at national and international level in addressing biodiversity at the policy level, the effects are not reflected in the state of biodiversity in practice, as the key drivers of biodiversity loss have not been addressed.

 

The whaling moratorium saved whale species from extinction

Whaling and whale conservation is one of the most well-known continuous environmental conflicts of the past 100 years. From the 19th century until the Second World War, the weight of whale conservation was low in the dispute, as it was dominated by states and companies engaged in industrial-scale whaling. After the Second World War, however, international organizations such as the International Whaling Commission (IWC) were set up as a forum for discussion. With the IWC, scientists also had the opportunity to participate in the debate.

Between World War II and the 1970s, anti-whaling discourse intensified and public opinion in many countries turned against whaling. At the same time, the influence of NGOs opposed to whaling increased. Whale conservation was increasingly associated with the idea of ​​saving the planet.

In the 1970s, an international debate was sparked by the fact that the vigorous whaling of the 1950s and 1960s had threatened to drive whale species to extinction. At the Stockholm Conference in 1972, the anti-whaling movement rose to the international political agenda, with the conference recommending the suspension of commercial whaling. In the 1970s, the importance of scientific knowledge was emphasized, which led, among other things, to the setting of catch quotas on a scientific basis. However, nature conservation organizations considered these quotas to be too high. The U.S. move to the anti-whaling bloc also reinforced the importance of whale conservation. 

In 1982, the IWC adopted a moratorium on whaling, which came into force in 1985. Commercial whaling has been banned since 1986. However, the ban on whaling has not ended the hundred-year-old controversy on whaling, nor has whaling ceased altogether. From the outset, the agreement has not covered traditional whaling. Norway, Iceland and Japan have also circumvented the ban on various grounds, such as those based on scientific research needs.

In the present day, the parties to the whaling dispute have diverged rather than converged.

The figure shows the catches of individuals of different whale species as well as the total catch. The top line represents the total number of individuals caught for all whale species. The most intense whaling was in the 1950s and 60s when more than 1.3 million whales were killed.

 

The Montreal Treaty saved the world from ozone depletion

Stopping ozone depletion is perhaps the most frequently mentioned example when seeking success stories in environmental protection and international environmental treaties. The atmospheric ozone layer refers to the part in the stratosphere (at about 15 to 50 kilometres of height) in which the vast majority of ozone has accumulated. The ozone layer protects the Earth’s surface from the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation, which has many harmful effects on life, including the increased risk of skin cancer for humans. Without restrictions to ozone-depleting substances, up to two-thirds of the ozone layer could have been destroyed by 2065, “increasing the risk of causing millions of cancer cases and the potential loss of half of the global agricultural production” (Andersen et al. 2013).

In the 1970s scientific knowledge about the causes and impacts of possible ozone depletion increased. One of the most important scientists enhancing this understanding was Paul J. Crutzen (1933–2021), who has already been mentioned earlier (in the first part of the course) as a key figure in introducing the concept of Anthropocene. In 1995, Crutzen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry especially for his studies in stratospheric ozone. Crutzen (1974, 201) states in his (now famous) article that “important reductions in atmospheric ozone may be caused by a number of human activities, such as stratospheric aviation, increased use of nitrates as fertilizers and the use of chlorofluoromethanes” (nowadays called chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs, or freons). The dangers of CFCs were reported especially by Molina and Rowland in 1974, and during the following decade, scientists debated, but mostly supported, the Molina – Rowland hypothesis about the harmfulness of CFCs.

Despite the intense scientific research, it was not until 1985 that the famous ‘ozone hole’ of Antarctica was found. By the early 1980s, projections of stratospheric models had indicated that only 2–4 percent of the ozone layer would be lost by the end of the 21st century because of the production of CFCs. In 1985, however, three scientists, Joe Farman, Brian Gardiner, and Jonathan Shanklin, reported in the prestigious science journal Nature unanticipated and large decrease in stratospheric ozone levels over the Antarctic and suggested that the decrease is linked to the human use of CFCs. (Farman et al. 1985, see Solomon 2019 for a brief introduction.) Just a few months earlier the United Nations Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer was signed in Vienna. However, it contained no legally binding goals for CFC reductions. The international co-operation was accelerated by the findings of Farman et al.

The international community including United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) had been alarmed and observing the potential harms associated with ozone since the mid-1970s. Some countries, firstly Sweden, had banned the use of CFCs already in the 1970s. After publishing the 1985 Farman et al. paper, the prohibition of ozone-depleting substances by an international treaty came about quite quickly. In September 1987, a conference of UNEP created the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, which was signed by 24 nations and the European Economic Community. It entered into force on 1 January 1989. Today, Montreal Protocol has been ratified by 196 nations and the European Union. Due to the exceptionally fast implementation (during a little more than a decade after understanding the scientific basis) and effectiveness (phasing-out of almost 95 percent of all CFC use) Montreal Protocol is described as perhaps the single most successful international environmental agreement to date.

Even though the aftermath of the Montreal Protocol is almost entirely positive, there are some critical voices in the scientific literature worth noting. Gareau (2013) admits that the Montreal Protocol is in many ways exemplary and there is truth in the typical narrative related to the protocol of how “corporations and nation-states—pressured by civil society—and the scientific community were able to put politics and economics aside vis-a-vis compelling scientific knowledge in order to achieve a global good”. Gareau nevertheless points out that this narrative ignores the fact that part of the success was possible because after the agreement came into force the powerful players, the United States, the United Kingdom, and major CFC-producing companies, were able to take over the market for replacement products. This is important to notice since it suggests that the Montreal protocol might not necessarily serve as an example for phasing out other polluting substances if their replacement threatens to change the status quo.

 

Other key environmental agreements

The previous part of the course explained how the environmental awakening took place in the 1960s and 70s, which also led to the acceleration of environmental diplomacy. A particularly significant event in this development was the aforementioned Stockholm Environmental Conference. Environmental awakening and the emergence of international environmental governance also led to concrete results through the conclusion of many environmental agreements as early as the 1970s. Here are a few of them.

Ramsar Convention

The Ramsar Convention is an international agreement to protect wetlands and waters concluded in 1971 in Ramsar, Iran. It entered into force in 1975. The Ramsar Convention is considered important as it was the first major interstate nature conservation agreement. The agreement was specifically aimed at the protection of waterfowl, but since then its implementation has focused on wetlands as a whole as particularly diverse habitats. The agreement has been signed by 171 UN member states. The Contracting Parties shall designate internationally valuable and particularly protected wetlands on the so-called Ramsar list. From Finland, for instance, 49 sites that have been protected as part of the EU's network of Natura conservation areas have been admitted to the list.

CITES agreement

Another important international nature conservation agreement is the CITES agreement of 1975, which regulates trade in endangered plant and animal species. The agreement has been signed by 183 countries. The agreement is accompanied by an up-to-date list of the species covered. There are more than 37,000 endangered species on the list. In the EU, the agreement has been implemented by the Union's own CITES legislation. The agreement is implemented through import and export restrictions controlled by customs. The export and import of CITES-listed species require a permit in accordance with the legislation of each country. The legislation applies to both companies and individuals. The agreement covers both live animals and plants and products made from endangered species, such as natural medicines or souvenirs.

UN World Heritage Convention

In addition to the international agreements mentioned, the United Nations has a range of instruments for the protection of nature and culture, including World Heritage Sites and Biosphere Reserves. The World Heritage Sites designated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) are based on the 1972 Convention on Cultural and Natural Heritage. Countries that have ratified the agreement can submit valuable cultural and natural sites to the World Heritage List. The aim is to increase knowledge of cultural heritage, the protection of sites, and international cooperation. Well-known World Heritage Sites include the Pyramids of Egypt and the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. 

The World Heritage Convention can be thought of as promoting the aforementioned cultural sustainability. As we learned before, according to Dessein et al. (2015), cultural sustainability can be perceived in many different ways, one of which sees culture as a target for protection and preservation. World Heritage sites, therefore, represent such cultural sustainability.

An agreement on the protection of intangible cultural heritage was also adopted in 2003. The intangible world heritage consists of a variety of knowledge, skills, customs, and traditions, often related to nature, which can be considered important for sustainable development. The protection of intangible cultural heritage can also be seen as linked to one of the dimensions of cultural sustainability mentioned by Dessein et al. More precisely, they are linked to the dimension where culture is considered part of a broader shift towards sustainable lifestyles – at least if we think that the protected customs and traditions may teach something about a more sustainable lifestyle. 

Biosphere reserves, then, are model areas for sustainable development that aim to combine conservation and sustainable use. In biosphere reserves, multidisciplinary research is being conducted on how conflicts between conservation and use can be resolved and on how sustainability can be promoted through collaboration between different actors. There are biosphere reserves in 129 countries.

 

More material online

Information on international biodiversity policy and related agreements: https://ym.fi/en/international-biodiversity-policy.

Information on national and EU programmes to improve the status of nature and water bodies: https://ym.fi/en/nature-and-water.

For reflection: international agreements have both successes and failures. Why do some agreements succeed in their objectives and others fail?  You can share your reflections and discuss with other course participants on the page linked below.

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