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.

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Global Environmental Governance: Fixing a troubled system - Adil Najam
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Global Environmental Governance

Addressing the urgent need for reform

What's New in Global Environmental Governance?

  • Measurement, Reporting and Verification; and Multilateral Environmental Agreements (annotated bibliographies)
    Under the ENTWINED research consortium, funded by the Swedish MISTRA Foundation, IISD is undertaking research on accountability as it relates to the World Trade Organization, including a comparison with accountability measures and approaches used in multilateral environmental agreements. This research has involved the review of a wide range of articles, books and other publications. These bibliographies, with brief annotations from our researchers, are made available here for the interest of the policy community.

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.

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