The Outcome of the Negotiations on the Global Pact for the Environment: A Commentary

Abstract

In May 2018, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the resolution “Towards a Global Pact for the Environment”. This resolution established an intergovernmental working group to discuss the opportunity to open treaty negotiations to codify the fundamental principles of international environmental law into a treaty dubbed the Global Pact for the Environment. In May 2019, the intergovernmental working group completed its mandate and adopted a set of recommendations that were formally endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly in August 2019. Contrarily to what the supporters of the Global Pact for the Environment project had hoped for, the working group only recommended the preparation of a “political declaration” without referring to the codification of the principles of international environmental law. This paper offers a critical commentary of the outcome of these negotiations. The analysis suggests that the decision to elaborate a Global Pact for the Environment would have entailed considerable risks for international environmental law and that if adopted, this instrument would not have necessarily helped to increase the problem-solving capacity of international environmental law. Based on the language used in the recommendation to prepare a “political declaration”, the paper also discusses some of the key elements that could shape and inform the upcoming negotiations of this declaration.

The Global Pact for the environment: Elements of codification or/and a new international agreement

“…In May 2019, the intergovernmental working group finished its work and adopted several recommendations which were officially supported by the UN General Assembly in August 2019. However, contrary to the expectations of a part of expert audience, the working group recommended that a "political declaration" should be made not requesting the principles of international environmental law to be codified (de Lassus St-Geniès, 2020). Yet, regardless of what will happen with the document, the idea on building up the environmental legal system through the adoption of a new document is seriously conceptually founded (Aguila, Vinuales, 2019).…”

The Role of the United Nations Environment Assembly in Emerging Issues of International Environmental Law

“…While the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 can be seen as an important step to integrate environmental concerns into a more traditional development policy, the international community is still dealing with environmental problems using an ad hoc, piecemeal and issue-by-issue approach. This has led to a mushrooming of partial solutions, "a myriad of multilateral agreements" [10] (p. 877) and institutional proliferation on the one hand, while on the other hand important gaps in international environmental policy still remain [11,12]. There are several international fora where environmental issues are discussed, and several of them have the potential of not only creating cooperative frameworks, but also politically and legally binding regimes.…”