The world community faces numerous global environmental challenges, ranging from rising sea levels caused by climate change to the extinction of valuable plant species used for creating new medicines.

To confront an issue that is does not respect national borders, we must set up protections and regulations at the global level. As new threats have surfaced over past years, a myriad of different institutions and treaties have been created to deal with each. As a result, the current international environmental government regime reflects a lack of coordination, insufficient funding and forceless mandates. A more coherent international environmental framework must be established

The framework of the institutions that govern multilateral environmental agreements is fragmented and has created overlapping and potentially contradictory programs and secretariats. The United Nations Environment Programme is the principal United Nations body in the environmental field. The United Nations has over a dozen bodies and specialized agencies with programs related to the environment, including the Commission on Sustainable Development, which was created in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. A partnership between UNEP, the UN Development Programme, and the World Bank sustains the Global Environment Facility, which makes grants to developing countries.  More than 500 international treaties and other agreements also address environmental issues. 

Effective international environmental cooperation and protection require sufficient financial resources. UNEP has a budget of approximately $100 million per year and the annual budgets of individual treaty secretariats are generally in the range of $1-10 million. In comparison, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had a budget of $7.8 billion in 2000

In addition to global institutions, bringing NGOs and US civil society into this process is a necessity, as these groups are necessary to influence public opinion and policy makers. The involvement of both developed and developing nations also is essential to finding solutions to a problem which we all share, and all must help solve.

United States Government should make a concrete and substantial commitment to strengthening international environmental governance and to cooperating with developing countries to address their own severe environmental challenges:

• Construct an empowered international organization to safeguard our global ecosystem, with the ability to enforce international environmental laws.

• Create binding international treaties to establish and consolidate laws to protect the atmosphere, outer space, oceans beyond national jurisdiction and other resources. The U.S. should take the initiative in establishing and carrying out multilateral work plans to implement environmental treaties and internationally-agreed environmental targets.

• Formalize links between environmental bodies and financial/trade institutions and revise economic indicators to account for the value of natural resources and the global commons.

• Give a higher priority to environmental protection in foreign assistance programs and in U.S. work with the intergovernmental organizations, including the World Bank and regional development banks.

• Improve protection of the global environment through increased funding.. The U.S. should increase substantially contributions to the international environmental agencies, such as the United Nations Environment Programme and the Global Environmental Facility.

UNEP on International Environmental Governance

Yale Global Environmental Governance Project
Excellent source of reports and resources on global environmental governance.

Heinrich Boll Foundation on global environmental governance at the Johannesburg 2002 summit.

World Resources Institute
Chapter 7 of WRI's World Resources 2002-2004: Decisions for the Earth: Balance, voice, and power addresses global environmental governance (PDF)