Global Environmental Governance
Global Environmental Governance is the title of a book written by Adil Najam, Mihaela Papa and Nadaa Taiyab. All the information of this article comes from this book. Introduction. Global environmental governance (GEG) is the sum of organizations, policy instruments, financing mechanisms, rules, procedures and norms that regulate the processes of global environmental protection. The efficacy of global environmental governance will ultimately depend on implementation at global and domestic levels. National implementation is the ultimate key, both to the efficacy of the GEG system and to meaningful environmental improvements. Since environmental issues entered the international agenda in  the early 1970s, global environmental politics and policies have been developing rapidly. The first global conference on the environment, held in Stockholm in 1972, set in motion three decades of discussion, negotiation and ratification of a whole series of international environmental agreements. The Stockholm Conference spawned the United Nations Environment Programme. The Earth Summit, held in Rio 20 years later, brought with it the Conventions on Biological Diversity, Climate Change and Desertification and created another UN political institution, the Commission on Sustainable Development. And the desire to host a prestigious international institution led to the decisions to locate the small  and underfunded secretariats of many of these agreements in many geographically diverse homes—from Montreal to Bonn to Rome and some places in between. Major institutions, such as the World Bank as well as the World Trade Organization, claim sustainable development as their overarching goal. A similar growth of interest is also seen within non- UN international and regional institutions in terms of environmental and sustainable development concerns. Multiple sources of funding for international environmental action are now available. These not only include the operational budgets of the various organizations but also specialized funding mechanisms created either as part of  specific treaties or in general. For example, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), created in 1991 has financed US$4.8 billion in projects and generated co-financing of US$15.6 billion. Evidence of Environmental Degradation. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have shown that ecosystem decline and global warming continue, representing real dangers to our planet. This state of affairs is well documented in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2006). For example, despite the feverish discussions about global climate change, carbon emissions continue to rise; global atmospheric CO2 levels that were around 300 parts  per million (ppm) in the early 1900s have now reached approximately 380 ppm. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment also found that approximately 60 per cent of the ecosystems that it examined were either being degraded or used unsustainably. Since 1980, 35 per cent of the world’s mangroves have been lost and 20 per cent of the world’s precious coral reefs have been destroyed. A decade after the signing of the Biodiversity Convention, the species extinction rate is still 1,000 times higher than what would be occurring naturally, without human impact. Despite the dozens of global and regional fisheries treaties , an estimated 90 per cent of the total weight of large predators in the oceans—such as tuna, sharks and swordfish—have disappeared over the last few decades. Estimates suggest that we may still be losing as much as 150,000 square kilometres of forest each year. Actors. A measure of the diversity of actors within the United Nations system whose activities somehow impact the environment is the membership of the UN Environmental Management Group (EMG) which was established by the UN Secretary General to "enhance UN system-wide inter-agency coordination" and whose membership consists of "programs, organs and specialized  agencies of the UN system, and all of the secretariats of multilateral environmental agreements". Each of these organizations has a defined environmental mandate and many have specified environmental activities. The membership of this group gives a still incomplete but impressive, picture of the breadth of actors that influence global environmental governance.