It Is Time for a Global Pact for the Environment
A Global Pact for the Environment would lend coherence to international environmental law, give greater legal and political heft to existing environmental covenants, and safeguard the imperiled biosphere.
By experts and staff
- Published
By
- Stewart M. PatrickJames H. Binger Senior Fellow in Global Governance and Director of the International Institutions and Global Governance Program
In my weekly column for World Politics Review, I examine a promising new multilateral initiative that could help strengthen environmental protections and reduce harms from climate change.
With each successive Earth Day, the scale of the global environmental crisis becomes more disheartening. So too does the collective failure to respond to the planet’s plight. Over the past year, scientists have issued dire warnings about global warming, mass extinction, the extent of plastic pollution and the death of the world’s oceans. Humanity is now deep in the Anthropocene, a new geologic era defined by the human transformation of the natural world, and the lights are blinking red.
One major target for the coming year should be for the United Nations to approve a new Global Pact for the Environment.
Read the full World Politics Review article here.