Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize award last year gave new energy to climate-change diplomacy. In the award’s wake, our next president has a unique chance to meet the world’s single biggest environmental challenge with a landmark agreement that commits the United States to re-join international efforts to cut gases that are causing the planet to warm. But such an agreement won’t be enough, because the world’s environmental institutions are too weak and too fragmented to enforce it. He or she should therefore accompany climate change policy with institutional reform: specifically, creation of a Global Environmental Organization, or “GEO.”
Even setting climate change aside, the need for a GEO is clear. Environmental policy is the orphan child of international law and institutions. Those interested in preserving the environment are far less able to make policy work than their cousins in trade, finance, labor and security.
For an illustrative comparison, look at trade policy. The world’s most important trade negotiations, agreements, and enforcement are centered in a single institution, the World Trade Organization (WTO). Based in Geneva, the WTO not only is the venue for the major contemporary trade negotiation - the Doha Round - but oversees 20 existing multilateral trade agreements on topics including services, and farm subsidies, tariffs, information technology and intellectual property. It has a single head, Director-General Pascal Lamy, whose background is as a leading French politician and European Union Commissioner. Its mandatory membership dues make the organization’s staff independent from the control of its powerful members. And each of the WTO’s 152 members has an Ambassador permanently stationed at the organization, who serves as a single point-person for trade negotiations and enforcement. The whole membership reviews each country’s compliance with the full array of agreements once every three years - and when this oversight falls short, WTO members settle their differences through an average of 10 dispute settlement cases every month.
The institutions created for finance, labor, and security over the course of the 20th century are similar. The United Nations and its Security Council handle peace and security, in extreme cases through resolutions backed by military force. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund have overseen finance and development since 1945, with advice backed by real money. The 90-year-old International Labor Organization sets out core labor standards binding on all the world’s businesses, unions, and governments. Each of these organizations has its own central headquarters, a chief officer with a staff funded by mandatory dues, and procedures for enforcing the rules. They all have weaknesses, of course. Some reflect the natural differences of interest among countries and the complexity of the world’s security and economic challenges. Others reflect differences of design, with the WTO probably given the most efficient means of arbitrating disputes. But even so, they unite sophisticated negotiating procedures and enforcement on everything from radio frequency allocation to peacekeeping in Haiti to child labor policy - and just as important, serve as a gateway for the flow of information on their issue to the world’s governments and public.
Environmental institutions and policy are a stark and sad contrast.
The lead international environmental body is the U.N. Environmental Programme (UNEP), an arm of the United Nations located in Nairobi. Tellingly labeled a “Programme” rather than an “organization,” it is run by a U.N. Undersecretary - that is, a second-tier official - rather than by an independent leader. Its funding comes from voluntary contributions rather than mandatory dues, and it is separated from the technical-aid organization known as the Global Environmental Facility.
Environmental agreements, as a result, are unsystematic and poorly enforced. They are scattered around the world, with the agreement on desertification headquartered in Germany, the Persistent Organic Pollutants agreement in Stockholm, chlorofluorocarbon control in Quebec, and Antarctic protection in Tasmania. Each has its own Secretariat, whose enforcement and oversight procedures operate independently of the rest. Countries participating in the agreements are free to sign some and ignore others. Neither governments nor interested citizens have an easy way to assess their obligations or their partners’ compliance.
It should be no surprise that international environmental protection often fails. The 1986 International Tropical Timber Agreement, whose 35 staffers at the Yokohoma headquarters are supposed to monitor and enforce limits on 21 million cubic meters worth of trade in tropical logs and timber, has been powerless to prevent the loss of more than a tenth of the world’s tropical forested land since its signature. The effort to protect sea turtles is a different illustration of the environmental system’s inadequacy - one showing its gaps rather than a simple failure of enforcement. Governments have used the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species to protect turtles from the relatively small threat of international trade in canned soup and turtle-shell jewelry, but have done nothing about the far greater threat of destruction of nesting beaches. Therefore the turtle population continues to decline.
Weak and uneven environmental institutions also increase economic costs to regulated companies and to regulatory agencies, as the U.S. history of environmental law illustrates. The current US system of law arose in large part from industry demands for a more level playing field. The 50 separate sets of state policy that prevailed up until the late 1960s made compliance costly and uncertain for companies and created strong incentives for some states with weaker laws to serve as pollution havens. In response, Congress during the 1960s created the federal system of air, water, and waste laws in place today - much as the creation of the WTO in the 1990s unified a disparate group of tariff agreements, subsidy and anti-dumping codes, and intellectual property rules. For challenges that are global in scope such as climate change, GEO’s economic and environmental imperative is obvious.
And the weaknesses of today’s environmental system will be vastly magnified in the event of a successful climate-change treaty. These issues are complicated by nature. A climate-change agreement will require vastly complex obligations and monitoring mechanisms. Spanning many countries and thousands of industries, it will require sophisticated enforcement tools that could sink the agreement in the absence of a clear, unbiased monitoring organization, as individual countries each seek to judge and enforce the compliance of all the rest. Even with the world’s good will and enthusiasm behind it, such an agreement could easily fail.
The time has therefore come for something simpler, stronger, and better. Put simply, global environmental policy needs institutions as strong and sophisticated as those we have for other topics. The environment needs a single organization, with mandatory dues and an independent chief of recognized international stature. It should take control of the existing welter of agreements, and serve as the main venue for enforcing them, fixing their weaknesses, and negotiating new ones. We suggest “Global Environmental Organization,” with the easy and appropriate acronym GEO.
The case for GEO is fundamentally simple. Global environmental protection means at least as much to the world’s present and future as trade, finance, labor, and security. Therefore we should take global environmental policy and institutions as seriously as we take these others. The time to start is now. And the individual most well-suited to serve as its first leader is none other than our Nobel laureate, Vice President Gore.
