The United Nations Decade of Ecosystem Restoration is an opportunity for States to advance the development of substantive and qualitative international law obligations for conducting restoration activities. This will help countries move beyond the more quantitative target‐driven approach that currently focuses international commitments on the percentage of degraded areas that have to be restored. In this paper, we argue for two pathways for States to accelerate and pursue international obligations to undertake ecological restoration. Firstly, we advocate for the development of a new international legal principle on ecological restoration, adding to existing international environmental law principles such as the prevention principle, and aiming at achieving the highest level of recovery possible. Secondly, we advocate to utilize available mechanisms through the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity and create a new protocol that will spell out a high ambition level for ecological restoration and a legal basis for adopting generally accepted rules and standards for restoration. The voluntary SER Principles and Standards can play an important role in the development of the legal principle on ecological restoration and standards of best practice.
The Ramsar Convention is the world’s most important international treaty governing wetland environments. Since the 1970s, the Convention has concerned itself with listing and protecting wetlands of international significance. However, in the past three decades, a focus has shifted from the identification of potential sites, towards addressing adverse changes in their ‘ecological character’. One of the few mechanisms Ramsar has at its disposal for achieving this is the Montreux Record (MR). The MR, first established in 1990, is a kind of ‘in danger’ list for Ramsar sites that have undergone, are undergoing, or are likely to undergo, adverse ecological change. Unlike other in-danger lists, such as, for example, under the World Heritage Convention, the MR is entirely voluntary and not deployed as a disciplinary measure or reputational sanction. The empirical research presented in this paper shows the declining use and importance of the MR. The paper provides an analysis of the composition and use of the MR from 1990 to 2018 and generates recommendations for how it might be used more effectively. The findings in this paper are significant, given the rapid declines of many Ramsar sites around the world.
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