Key Message
UNEP must provide leadership in at least two respects. It must mobilize to assess the environmentally-based risks to prosperity, security and equity on a continuous basis, and at different geographical levels. It must ensure that these assessments are placed in front of those with power and leverage. And it must be in the forefront of the process of convening, developing, managing and overseeing the constant evolution of rules and regulations needed to ensure the environmental basis for prosperity and security.
Video
Global Environmental Governance: Fixing a troubled system - Adil Najam
(Flash Video - 6:24 min)
Global Environmental Governance
Addressing the urgent need for reform
What's New in Climate Change and Energy?
-
GEG Briefing Paper Series
IISD has launched a series of briefing papers on global environmental governance as outputs of the "Mapping Global Environmental Governance Reform" project of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). The initiative was conceived of and funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Denmark. Three briefing papers are available: one on tracking global environmental financing (PDF - 233 kb); one on climate change and global governance (PDF - 346 kb); and one offering four steps toward targeted GEG coherence (PDF - 456 kb).
Over the last few years, an intensified debate has emerged among governments and policy-makers, as well as scholars, on options for the reform of the global environmental governance (GEG) system. Given increasing evidence of environmental degradation, the system needs reform urgently not because it has “failed,” but because it has outgrown its original design.
The system's high maintenance needs, its internal redundancies and its inherent inefficiencies have combined and now have the perverse effect of distracting from the most important GEG goal of all—improved environmental performance. Much like children who outgrow their clothes as they mature, or small towns that need new infrastructure as they blossom into large cities, the GEG system needs to be rethought so that it can meet the challenges of its own growth, respond to future issues and move from its current emphasis on awareness-raising and treaty creation to actual environmental action and implementation.
Contents
-
Global Environmental Governance: Reform options
IISD's GEG work aims to advance the ideas emerging from our publication Global Environmental Governance: A Reform Agenda by disseminating these ideas widely and triggering conversations about them among relevant stakeholders, and by developing a selected set of key ideas into more detailed proposals, with a particular focus on practical implementability.