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In his 2009 report on the world financial and economic crisis and its impact on development, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed concerns about a range of direct and indirect impacts on the environment. Those concerns included the impact of a slow-down in investment in environmentally sustainable technologies, as well as the impact of stimulus packages that relied on poorly planned infrastructure and resource development. They included worries about whether higher levels of unemployment would result in greater and unsustainable use of subsistence resources. Against the backdrop of these concerns, this article examines the impact of both the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the current global financial crisis on environmental sustainability in East Asia. It shows that both crises generated similar patterns of environmental impact, but that those impacts were at times counter-intuitive and ambiguous. Positive impacts were short-lived and negative impacts were little affected in the longer term.

Recent surveys in Australia show that improving the global environment rates high as a public policy concern. Responding to these challenges at a global level requires more than finding the best or most appropriate scientific, economic and technical approaches. It also requires that global environmental governance be based on sound normative principles. Two of the most important principles respond to the challenge that, while humanity is outstripping its ecological footprint, contributions to global environmental change are uneven and the experience of environmental harm is being displaced across time and space. Improving the global environment should therefore take into account the precautionary principle and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. Improving the global environment also requires a more robust institutional framework. The model favoured here is to build on UNEP to establish a more coherent, more authoritative and more independent environmental organization.

The black market in ozone-depleting substances (ODS) is a direct consequence of international agreement on targets to reduce and phase-out the production and consumption of such chemicals. Yet the Montreal Protocol says nothing about illegal trade (as opposed to unauthorised trade) and it is widely accepted that the Parties had not anticipated such an outcome and were slow to respond. In effect, then, the Protocol itself created the opportunity structure for illegal activity in situations where perverse incentives generate high profits and low entry costs. This chapter draws on criminology, economic sociology and public policy to examine the logistic trails and smuggling networks that sustain the ODS black market. It examines how ODS smuggling has gone global, how that black market blurs the boundaries between legitimate industry and white collar crime, and how those involved have been able to adjust their strategies for illegal transboundary activity in response to changing structures of demand and supply.

While statements by the United Nations Security Council and the Secretary-General demonstrate that environmental degradation is accepted as a possible non-military threat to international peace and security, none of the relevant documentation proceeds to consider how the Security Council might respond to such new threats and sources of instability and conflict. This article examines and evaluates a number of options available to the Security Council should its members choose to address this agenda in more detail. It argues that the UN Charter, international humanitarian law and operational precedent provide an environmental mandate for the Security Council. Any authorization of force, however, is most likely to be confined to environmental war crimes. A more important environmental role for the Security Council lies in preventive diplomacy, conflict resolution and postconflict reconstruction.

Cardiovascular abnormalities and arrhythmias are common in individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) who are undergoing vibrostimulation for sperm retrieval. The study aimed to examine cardiovascular control in men with SCI undergoing this procedure.Individuals with chronic cervical (n=8; age: 33.1 +/- 1.9 years) and upper thoracic SCI (n=5; age: 35.2 +/- 2.9 years) volunteered for vibrostimulation, with continuous blood pressure (Finometer) and electrocardiographic monitoring. Patients were characterized further by sympathetic skin responses (SSR) to assess descending autonomic spinal pathways and American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA) scores to assess motor and sensory pathways.All but one subject with cervical SCI were ASIA A or B and were negative for SSR in the hands and feet. All subjects with upper thoracic SCI were ASIA A or B and were positive for SSR in the hands. Systolic blood pressure was lower in men with cervical injury at rest. Vibrostimulation induced an increase in systolic blood pressure20 mmHg in all patients with cervical SCI (range = 125/65 - 280/152; median = 167/143 mmHg) and in 2 thoracic subjects (151/104 and 170/121 mmHg). During ejaculation, 6 cervical and 3 thoracic subjects developed arrhythmias (5 with bradycardia, 6 with premature atrial contractions, 4 with ventricular excitation, 1 with junctional rhythm, and 1 with heart block).The vibrostimulation procedure induced electrocardiographic abnormalities and autonomic dysreflexia in subjects with either cervical or high thoracic SCI.

As the scope of environmental concerns expanded in the 1970s and 1980s, greater attention was paid to the transboundary and then global aspects of pollution, as pollutants dispersed across state borders through air and ocean currents, or were physically displaced through trade or dumping. Political action often followed scientific concern and pressure for action from non-governmental environmental organizations. Debates have centred on whether pollution should be regulated or prevented and increasing attention has come to be given to precautionary action, at least in principle. The problems and difficulties in the negotiations echo those demonstrated in Chapter 2: competing interests between polluter and victim states, the imperatives of sovereignty, compromises between substantive agreements and declaratory frameworks, resistance to targets and firm commitments, and permissive compliance and verification procedures. The chapter begins with an examination of the problem of the transboundary dispersal and displacement of hazardous waste and toxic chemicals. It then turns to the management of pollution in the oceans and the atmosphere which provide the second and third case studies in this chapter.

Strategies designed to give effect to sustainable development and to the idea of common but differentiated responsibilities have focused on transfer mechanisms, on the reform of existing structures and processes within the globalised political economy, and on the application of economic instruments to environmental protection. These are, however, not simply technical exercises where the problems to be solved are ones of modality. They involve political and social issues which relate to questions about the distribution of costs and benefits, the management of competing interests and to debates not just over how to implement such strategies but also over whether they are of any value in the first place. Thus the underlying structures and processes of the international political economy are called into question.

Conservation issues have been fundamental to the globalizing environmental agenda. Traditional concerns with the preservation of nature and wildlife in pristine wilderness areas have shifted to encompass concerns about the conservation of species and biodiversity, the protection of living, renewable and supposedly inexhaustible resources and the protection of habitat and ecosystems, including biologically productive land. Collective action is now necessary for the management and protection of endangered wildlife, species, genetic diversity, habitat and resources. Political tensions arise over more than appropriate management strategies. They have become bound up in disagreements over sustainable use, commodification and intellectual property rights, utility rather than amenity value, the imperative of sovereign ownership of natural resources, conflicting values and cultural traditions, and disputes about what constitutes a local or global problem.

One of the hallmarks of the global politics of the environment has been the growth in number, scope and activity of a range of non-state actors, including scientific organisations, industry and business, environmental and conservation organisations, grass-roots movements and indigenous peoples’ organisations, who have sought in various ways to influence environmental policy or who have become crucial environmental actors. Section III of Agenda 21 acknowledged this broadening of the list of stakeholders, anticipating roles in environmental governance and the pursuit of sustainable development for a variety of sectors of society, collectively defined as the ‘independent sector’ or the major groups. While some mention is made in this chapter of the role of the scientific community and multinational corporations (MNCs), the main focus here is the growth of global civil society through non-governmental organisations.

The Antarctic terrestrial ecosystem is marked by limited biological diversity. By contrast the marine ecosystem of the Southern Ocean is teeming with life, including seals, whales and over forty species of birds and more than 200 species of fish. There are four species of Antarctic seal — the crabeater, Weddell, leopard and Ross — and two more species, the Southern fur seal and the Southern elephant seal, which breed in the sub-Antarctic islands and range across the whole Southern Ocean (see Laws, 1983, p. 609; Roberts, 1977, p. 99). The southern oceans are also host to six species of baleen (or filter-feeding) whale — the blue, fin, sei, humpback, minke and southern right whale — and two species of toothed whale — the sperm and killer whales (see Tierney, 1978, p. 8). Forty species of breeding birds, of which penguins are by far the most numerous, inhabit the Antarctic region although only sixteen of them actually breed on the continent itself (Tierney, 1978, p. 8).

The third of the resource conventions negotiated by the Antarctic Treaty consultative parties was the Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities. The minerals issue brought into the open tensions among the consultative parties which had been more easily managed in the living resource negotiations. It was the issue on which competing national interests were most in evidence, and the issue which throughout its negotiation and afterwards challenged the stability of the Treaty system. It was the pivotal issue in bringing Antarctic environmental protection to the forefront of public debate and the one which generated the most critical attention from states which were not members of the Antarctic Treaty.