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Faced with a global emissions problem such as climate change, we know that if countries' emissions decisions are made in an independent and self-interested fashion the outcome can be very far from optimal. One proposed solution is to have countries enter international environmental agreements (IEAs) whereby individual countries' emissions decisions are taken in the interests of all the participating countries and so reflect a degree of altruism. However, if the decision to co-operate is made in a self-interested fashion the standard non-cooperative model of IEAs yields the pessimistic conclusion that the more serious the environmental problem the smaller will be the equilibrium membership of an IEA. Our paper examines the implications for emissions, IEA membership and welfare of assuming that countries make both emissions and IEA membership decisions in the alternative moral fashion of acting as imperfect Kantians as defined by Alger and Weibull (Econometrica 81:2269–2302, 2013). We show that (i) the first-best can be achieved when countries either act as Perfect Kantians or by fully cooperating; (ii) in a more imperfect setting, these two forms of moral behaviour are complementary approaches to improving welfare outcomes in the sense that the greater the weights on Kantian behaviour the larger is the equilibrium coalition; (iii) the weights on Kantian behaviour that will induce full cooperation and hence the first-best are significantly less than 1; (iv) for given Kantian weights, our model generates higher equilibrium IEA membership, lower emissions and higher welfare than in the related paper by Eichner and Pethig (International environmental agreements when countries behave morally) which, we argue, does not fully capture the benefits of membership decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to investigate the problem of designing and building International Environmental Agreements (IEAs) taking into account some normative properties. We consider n asymmetric countries of the world, each one generating a quantity of pollutant emissions from the production of goods and services. We assume that individual emissions yield private benefits and negative externalities affecting all countries. To determine its own level of pollution, each state conducts a cost-benefit analysis. The absence of a supranational entity imposing emissions reduction makes IEAs based on voluntary participation. Examining the standard static non-cooperative game-theoretical model of coalition formation, we discover that the resulting emissions allocations might not be equitable à la Foley. It means that there might exist at least one player preferring to implement some other agent's strategic plan instead of to play her own strategy. With the goal of studying whether equity, at least among coalesced countries, may be a criterion leading to social improvement, we introduce a new optimization rule. We require that members of an environmental coalition have to solve the maximization problem subject to the constraint imposing that they do not envy each other. Analyzing the particular case of two-player games, we get that, when countries are, in a sense, not too different from each other, our new mechanism endogenously induces social equity. By imposing a suitable total emission cap, the same results extend to all those games where our and standard solutions coexist and are different. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International review mechanisms can help states overcome collective action problems by revealing accurate information about their cooperative intent and performance. However, many existing review mechanisms have lenient informational requirements, leading to ambiguous reporting that impedes mutual verification of efforts and potentially undermines cooperation. This article evaluates how commitment ambiguity affects cooperation under the Paris Agreement on climate change, which features a pledge-and-review system where governments decide unilaterally on the depth of their commitments. We develop a decision-theoretic model of ambiguity and risk behavior in climate pledges that delineates the relationship between commitment ambiguity and ambition. In our model, commitment ambiguity is a sum of structural uncertainty and strategic ambiguity. We argue that structural uncertainty—information constraints that prevent governments from perfectly gauging their commitment potential—reduces ambition in climate pledges. This prudence effect is driven by compliance concern: The anticipated international and domestic audience costs arising from noncompliance induce policymakers to adjust ambition downward. Our empirical analysis of all climate pledges under the Paris Agreement demonstrates that ambiguous pledges are less ambitious than precise pledges, in line with our prudence conjecture. We also show that democracies are more prudent than autocracies, reflecting systemic variations in domestic audience costs. Overall, this article contributes an original theory of how ambiguity affects cooperation in international institutions and produces empirical findings that shed light on the effectiveness of international climate cooperation.

We study the endogenous formation of climate coalitions linked to a preferential free trade arrangement. In a multi-stage, micro founded strategic trade and participation game, coalition and fringe countries dispose of a discriminatory tariff on dirty imports as well as emission permits imposed on domestic producers. Permits are traded on a common permit market inside the coalition and on local markets outside, respectively. We provide an analytical solution for the general equilibrium and the policy game, in the three country case, while the participation game is solved by Monte Carlo simulation. Moreover, conditional probabilities are computed for the transition to coalitions of various sizes induced by free trade. Under various regimes analyzed, we find that preferential free trade can create strong incentives for building effective climate coalitions in terms of depth and breadth. This result even holds if fringe countries are given the option of trade cooperation as a retaliation devise and is driven by a favorable shift in the coalition's terms of trade. As a policy implication, negotiations on international climate treaties and free trade arrangements should be interlinked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine international environmental agreements (IEAs) in which heterogeneous countries work together to not only participate in the abatement of greenhouse gas emissions but also develop breakthrough technologies. In this paper, the country with the most advanced technology (i.e. the technological leader) develops a new abatement technology and distributes it to other countries (i.e. technological laggards) through licensing. We design a new mechanism to achieve cooperation among heterogeneous countries through an initial payment and refunding (IPR) scheme and licensing involving third-party organizations (TPOs). Under our new IPR scheme with licensing, the cost incurred by a technology leader in developing new technology is covered by licensing fees using a portion of the initial payments collected from technological laggards by a TPO. As a result, TPOs sustain IEAs by flexibly adjusting technological laggards' share of costs for licensing, comprising initial payments and refunds, and the amount of the licensing payment made to the technological leader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents empirically calibrated simulations of three different variants of environmental matching agreements aimed at reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. We determine whether matching agreements can produce larger stable coalitions and increase abatement contributions and payoffs as compared to standard agreements. The matching agreements we analyze feature uniform matching rates by which coalition members match the unconditional contributions of (i) the other coalition members, (ii) all other players, or (iii) only non-members, while non-members do not commit to any matching and maximize their individual payoffs. The simulation considers twelve asymmetric world regions with linear abatement benefits and quadratic costs, calibrated based on the STACO 3 model, and uses emissions data from the shared socioeconomic pathways database. We find that the first variant of the matching game fails to produce any stable coalitions and thus performs worse than the standard agreement that produces a stable two-player coalition. The second variant produces a stable grand coalition and significantly increases the abatement and payoff levels beyond the non-cooperative Nash baseline. Partial coalitions are unstable in this game. The third variant produces a two-player coalition similar to the standard coalition formation game, but with different members and higher abatement and payoff levels due to the matching mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The power that the United States has been able to exert in international environmental agreements has not always worked towards establishing a better global environment mainly due to a clash of national and international interests. Through the analysis of the Reagan Administration (1981-1989), this essay aims to show how the presidential administrative capacities on the national level can lead to unexpected consequences on the international level. In this respect, this essay will focus on two important topics—the Montreal Protocol and the U.S.-Canada bilateral relations—which led to remarkably different outcomes, albeit starting from similar premises.

This article examines the influence of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, known as the Rio Summit, on the design of subsequent international environmental agreements (IEAs). In particular, it investigates the extent to which the principles outlined in the Rio Declaration were integrated into IEAs concluded in the following years. We focus our investigation on three principles: the precautionary principle, common but differentiated responsibilities, and the polluter pays principle. Analyzing a collection of 2,211 IEAs and their 509 amendments, we find that the Rio Summit catalyzed the dissemination of these principles. However, our study also reveals that the Rio Conference was an inflection point, wherein weaker expressions of these principles became more prevalent. Stronger expressions, which were included in some IEAs prior to the Rio Summit, became relatively less common thereafter. We call this evolutionary process the 'survival of the weakest'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION. Global plastic production has increased from 1.5 million tons in 1950 to 390 million tons in 2021, of which only 9 % was recycled, 19 % was incinerated, almost 50 % was disposed of in landfills and 22 % was dumped in landfills, where this waste could be openly burned or released back into the environment. Plastics have changed the global economy and the lives of billions of people for the better. However, their use comes with significant environmental and social costs. Plastic waste negatively affects human health and the environment. The life cycle of plastics covers the entire spectrum of activities, from raw material extraction, production, distribution, use, to disposal as waste, and environmental problems can arise at any stage of the plastic life cycle. Most plastic degrades very slowly in the environment. There are currently a number of international commitments to reduce marine litter and plastic waste, particularly from land-based sources, and several applicable international agreements and soſt law instruments related to trade in plastics or reducing impacts on marine life. However, none of the international documents provides a global, mandatory, specific and measurable target to reduce plastic pollution. In this regard, many states, as well as commercial actors and civil society, are calling for the adoption of a global instrument to regulate marine pollution from litter and plastics. In this article, significant attention is paid to the analysis of a future treaty aimed at combating plastic pollution.MATERIALS AND METHODS. This study is based on the analysis of a large volume of materials, including international legal acts, advisory acts, as well as modern doctrinal studies by Russian and foreign authors. The methodological basis of the study was general scientific (method of logical and system analysis, dialectical method, methods of deduction and induction) and special scientific (historical-legal, comparative-legal, formal legal methods, method of legal modeling and forecasting) methods of cognition.RESEARCH RESULTS. In the course of the study, various international acts of a mandatory and recommendatory nature were analyzed, the doctrinal positions set out in the scientific literature, put forward by domestic and foreign legal scholars, were summarized, and the main problems of combating plastic pollution were identified.DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS. Within the framework of this article, an attempt has been made to give answers to the following questions: to what extent the problem of plastic pollution is an important challenge for modern international law, whether current international law effectively regulates the problem of plastic pollution, what should be the content of a new treaty on plastic and what are the positions of states on its content.

Previous literature has proposed that international cooperation in small groups of countries, so-called “climate clubs,” will be an effective complement to the UNFCCC process. Little research has investigated the potential for an industry-specific climate club. Filling this gap, we assess possibilities for a climate club in the aviation sector in which “leader” countries pay followers to use sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs). We seek to understand if such cooperation is possible at a reasonable price. In addition, we examine the ideal coalition size for successful cooperation and the sensitivity of outcomes to SAF price and mix rate. To investigate these questions, we use an agent-based model calibrated with data on countries’ populations, GDP, and jet fuel consumption. Our results indicate that modest cooperation is possible under various circumstances but limited by SAF price and maximum mix rate. Furthermore, there may be compelling reasons to start with a very small number of club members.

Solar geoengineering (SG) may have the potential to reduce extreme climate damages worldwide. Yet, international coordination will make the difference between success and failure in leveraging it. Using a simple game-theoretic framework, we investigate whether the stability of an efficient, self-enforcing international agreement on SG is attainable. We demonstrate that side payments from countries less vulnerable to climate change to those more vulnerable can guarantee the stability of an efficient agreement. The size of the side payments will vary within a zone of possible agreement, which will change depending on certain key assumptions. For example, assuming stronger mitigation reduces the necessary payments. Alternatively, asymmetry in national damages from SG over-provision vs. under-provision justifies larger payments; here, the welfare-optimal strategy may be deployment that makes no one worse off. We also show that an agreement may be stable without side payments if deployment costs are substantial and counter-SG is available, while a moratorium may be socially optimal if SG brings substantial global non-excludable fixed costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION. A large number of international treaties regulating various spheres of international relations have already entered into force. As current practice shows, the emphasis has shifted from the need to regulate an increasing number of relationships to the importance of improving the efficiency of existing international treaties. The article analyzes the implementation of this process in international environmental law. The authors show that a number of global and regional environmental agreements have established quasi-judicial procedures (so-called "non-compliance procedures") in the form of implementation and compliance committees serving as international control mechanisms. The purpose of such mechanisms is to identify and resolve both local and systemic theoretical and practical issues of non-compliance arising from the provisions of international treaties.MATERIALS AND METHODS. The article is based on a large amount of material, including international binding legal acts, acts of advisory nature, and modern doctrinal research of Russian and foreign authors. The methodological basis of the research consists of general scientific (methods of logical and system analysis, dialectical method, methods of deduction and induction) and private scientific (historical and legal, comparative legal, formal-legal methods, the method of legal modeling and forecasting) methods of cognition.RESEARCH RESULTS. In their research, the authors analyzed various international binding and non-binding instruments, summarized doctrinal positions made by Russian and Western legal scholars, presented in domestic and foreign scientific literature, and identified the main issues of compliance committees of international environmental agreements.DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS. The authors have tried to give answers to the following questions: is it necessary to fix in the text of international environmental agreements the provisions establishing the compliance committee, or can this be done later: at the annual meetings of the conferences of the parties; what should be the composition and mandate of the compliance committee; and how efficiently do these committees function? As a result of the conducted research, the authors have drawn conclusions about the need fo detailed monitoring of changes in the various international environmental agreements in order to improve the effectiveness of compliance committees in exercising their mandates and to identify violations of the mandates of these committees.

Broad participation and compliance are key elements of any successful international environmental agreement (IEA). Notwithstanding the participation of a significant number of countries in the Paris Agreement, the level of compliance remains challenging. This article investigates the potential role of fairness in enhancing compliance under the Paris Agreement. It draws lessons from the Montreal and Kyoto protocols that could assist the Paris Agreement in incentivising countries. The article discusses the operationalisation of the common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR-RC) principle in different treaties. A formulaic approach to interpreting the CBDR-RC principle and the imposition of restrictions on non-compliant parties could be effective ways of promoting compliance with the Paris Agreement. Besides, market-based solutions are considered as economic approaches to incentivising countries to meet the climate target. The importance of market-based solutions is supported by the findings from a worldwide survey among international delegates negotiating the Paris Agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the relationship between the Draft Global Pact for the Environment (the Global Pact) and relevant international documents (declarations and international environmental agreements) and the legislation of Republic of Serbia (RS). The first part of the article provides a survey of the contents of the Global Pact, pointing to the significance of the international environmental law principles included in this document. The next part of the paper discusses the relationship between the Global Pact principles and RS legislation, with specific reference to the relationship between the Global Pact and the right to a (healthy) environment. The author concludes that the norms of the Global Pact and those of the international environmental agreements and RS domestic laws coincide to a great extent. Apart from the intentions to codify environmental law principles, the Global Pact also introduces some new principles whose contents and scope should be analysed in detail.

This article examines populists' relationship with non-state actors in international environmental agreements (IEAs). We ask whether populist governments favor transnational non-state actors' access to these institutions. Using data on the design of IEAs since the 1970s, evidence is reported suggesting that populists seek to institutionalize non-state actors' access to IEAs. To explain this relationship, we argue that populist governments likely want to reduce and undermine the influence of established elites, also in international institutions. To this end, they may want to institutionalize access of their own constituents within IEAs. The empirical implication of this claim is that institutionalized access of non-state actors in IEAs is more likely when populist governments are involved. The empirical results provide strong and robust support for our argument, and these findings contribute to our knowledge in a number of areas of environmental politics and political science in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private standards play an increasingly important governance role, yet their effects on state‐led policymaking remain understudied. We examine how the operation of private agricultural standards influences multilateral pesticide governance with a particular focus on the listing of substances under the Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade, a treaty‐based information‐sharing mechanism that allows countries to refuse hazardous chemical imports. We find that private agricultural standard‐setting bodies use the Rotterdam Convention's pesticide list to develop their own lists of banned substances. This alters the Rotterdam Convention's intended role, impeding efforts to add substances to the treaty, as attempts by private actors to impose stricter governance than state actors can undermine the potential for international state‐based governance to become more stringent. We characterize this as a "confounding interaction" whereby institutional linkages between actions by public and private actors with broadly aligned goals results in unexpected negative consequences for governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enforcement and management scholars alike expect that countries participating in an international agreement will more likely achieve predetermined targets than nonparticipating countries will. The management school ascribes this expected association to a constraining effect of the treaty; the enforcement school ascribes it to a screening effect. If the latter conjecture is correct, the association between participation and target achievement should significantly weaken (or even vanish) when controlling for targets' ambition level and other confounding factors. We test this hypothesis on a new dataset comprising three protocols under the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP). Our results suggest that the positive association between participation and target achievement is robust to controlling for confounding factors; hence, our data suggests that these CLRTAP protocols have indeed constrained participating states.

This paper examines the formation of multiple coalitions under the umbrella of an international environmental agreement. Using a repeated game, we demonstrate that in any coalition structure consisting of only two or three countries, cooperation can be sustained through punishments inflicted on the deviating country from agreement rules by fellow coalition members if the discount factor is greater than 1 / 2. Furthermore, our rules of agreement can be effective even in the case of heterogeneous countries if coalitions are formed among the same type of countries. With this method, a coalition consisting of two or three countries is sustained whenever the discount factor is greater than 1 / 2 , as is the case with symmetric countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UNFCC on climate change specifies that all nations must follow the rule of 'common' with differentiation regarding their responsibilities for the protection of the global environmental system. Recently, the formulation and stability of the IEA have been increased in the literature by applying the concept of game theory to make the climate agreements successful at the national and the international level. This study provides a novel evolutionary game theoretic model of self-enforcing IEA to overcome the free rider problem. The fundamental difference between our paper and existing literature is that we examine enforcement within a model as IEA has a governing authority while the typical model of enforcement involves a government enforcing a rule that it has imposed. For this purpose, we assign countries into different grades according to their pollution levels, consider a combination of rewards and penalties, use replicator dynamics to derive the conditions for the population steady state, and examine how the proposed regulatory mechanism fares in this steady state. This framework enables us to avoid the free rider and renegotiation problems as well as the rationality assumption. We establish the condition for evolutionary stability. The global environmental problem is managed effectively as a reward-punishment scheme and the monitoring frequency of IEA fulfills this condition. Our results provide an allocation principal with stable conditions under which countries get more benefits by monitoring the IEA and stability of the grand coalition holds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zoonotic viruses have sacrificed hundreds of millions of people throughout human history. There are currently 1.7 million unidentified viruses estimated to be circulating in mammal and bird populations. It is foreseeable that in the near future, another of these will transmit to people, heralding the start of the next pandemic—one potentially more deadly than COVID-19. At the core of this article is a call for pre-emptive protection of the natural environment and its regenerative systems as the first fundamental step in the prevention of future epidemics and pandemics. While zoonoses originate in nature, the predominant legal discipline, managing these crises, is international health law which is invoked reactively once an outbreak has been reported. In this paper, we identify the need for a legal shift in epidemic and pandemic responses. In particular, we call for the incorporation of international environmental agreements to prevent the initial viral spillover from animal to human populations. We propose a strategy of strengthening existing agreements and a coupling of legal disciplines, such as health and environmental law, emphasizing the need for synergies across legal disciplines to enhance the emergence and management of future pandemics and epidemics. We introduce Coupled Human and Natural Systems (CHANS) Law to frame the required integration across legal instruments to regulate inextricably human-nature connections and advocate for the development of a Convention on Epidemics and Pandemics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies how the investment in adaptation can influence the participation in an international environmental agreement (IEA) when countries decide in adaptation before they choose emissions. Three types of agreements are studied, a mitigation agreement for which countries coordinate their decisions only on emissions; an adaptation agreement for which there is only coordination when countries decide their levels of adaptation and a complete agreement when there is coordination in both emissions and adaptation levels. In every case, we assume that the degree of effectiveness of adaptation is bounded from above, in order words, adaptation can alleviate the environmental problem, but it cannot solve it by itself leading the vulnerability of the country to almost zero. Our first results show that in our symmetric model where signatories select the same level of adaptation there are not signatory-signatory international externalities and the complete agreement coincides with the mitigation agreement, and moreover it does not matter when adaptation is chosen with respect to emissions. The main contribution of this paper is to show that the grand coalition could be stable for all types of agreement, but only for extremely high degrees of effectiveness of adaptation. If this condition is not satisfied, the model predicts low levels of membership. The standard result of three countries is found for the mitigation/complete agreement. For the adaptation agreement participation can be higher than three, but not higher than six countries. In any case, we can conclude that under reasonable values for the degree of effectiveness of adaptation, in our model adaptation does not promote participation in an IEA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the political ideology of negotiating parties influence the design of international environmental agreements? This article distinguishes between leftist and rightist executives in democracies to develop a twofold argument. First, left-leaning democratic governments tend to be generally more environmental-friendly, which implies that they should favor designs that are more conducive to effective institutions. Second, leftist democratic executives are commonly less concerned about sovereignty costs. Both mechanisms suggest that environmental treaties likely comprise "legalized," i.e., hard-law elements when left-wing democracies negotiate their design. The empirical implication of the theory is tested with quantitative data on international environmental agreements since 1975. The findings report an association between leftist ideology in democracies and agreement legalization, although this is driven by aspects of sovereignty delegation. This article contributes to the literatures on environmental institutions, international cooperation more generally, as well as party politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The key objective of the study is to explain the contribution of environmental auditing in the improvement and protection of the environment while respecting the concept of sustainable development. The study describes the role and benefits of environmental auditing in organizations as part of the governance framework based on the adopted broad regulatory framework of international environmental agreements like Espoo Convention, International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards and the impact of the community governance framework on EU sustainable development policies using relevant EU normative acts like Regulation No 1836/93, EnvironmentalManagement and Audit Scheme (EMAS) Regulation, Directive 2012/27/EU, Member-States legislation. The classification features of environmental auditing have been clarified and systematized in accordance with its role and functions in the environmental management system. There is information on the shift of purely environmental auditing to the audit of labour protection, ecology, industrial and fire safety (joint audit). The relationship between environmental auditing, certification and environmental management systems is shown. There is a comparison of financial audit and environmental auditing; their similarities and differences have been revealed. The research results can be put into practice to provide specific proposals for reducing pollution and improving environmental protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the stability of international environmental agreements in a dynamic game when the generation of both renewables and fossil fuel based energy requires specialized capital stocks or technologies, respectively. Two contract types are considered. At an incomplete (a complete) contract, the coalition coordinates only (both) CO 2 emissions (and renewable energy investments) of its members. In contrast to the results of Battaglini and Harstad (J Polit Econ 124:160–204, 2016) who endorse incomplete contracts to increase the coalition size, only small coalitions are stable regardless of whether the contract is complete or incomplete. This result also holds if black technology is temporary not completely used or transfers are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The structural elements of global environmental governance are notoriously difficult to change and align with the needs of a rapidly deteriorating earth system. This, however, only increases the need to focus on the role of agency in this context. This paper does so by taking stock of what we know about agency in relation to International Environmental Agreements (IEAs) and suggests directions for future research. We contribute a conceptual framework to enable the mapping of research on agency related to IEAs and advance more systematic study of agency in this context. The framework differentiates between the negotiation of IEAs, their implementation and outcomes, and includes agency-related and context-related drivers of agency in these processes. We subsequently review articles published between 2003 and 2020 in the journal International Environmental Agreements (as one of the few journals exclusively focusing on IEAs) dealing with actors' agency and analyse how these articles address agency in the context of IEAs. We conclude firstly by identifying avenues for how further research can fill important gaps, including a need for increased transparency on the methods and theories used in articles, and more comparative research particularly on agency dynamics in implementation; and secondly by highlighting important pointers for policy-makers including the need to re-evaluate the role of national sovereignty and address the forces that counteract equality and justice. Key lessons include the need to improve global south countries' capacity to influence IEA negotiations (input legitimacy), the central role of public and peer pressure on countries to implement commitments, the impact of multilevel governance dynamics and the importance of ensuring that IEAs benefit local communities (output legitimacy). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental justice issues have been incrementally but consistently covered within this journal in the last two decades. This article reviews theoretical and empirical approaches to justice in INEA scholarship in order to identify trends and draw lessons for the interpretation and implementation of the 2030 Agenda and for living within environmental limits. Our review traces how justice considerations were initially covered within new institutionalist scholarship on collective action and social practices, to conceptualizing justice as 'access and allocation', to newer notions of planetary justice. We link these trends to scholarship on diverse epistemologies and typologies of justice, including conservative, corrective, distributive and procedural justice, and examine their operationalization within the empirical domains of climate, water and sustainable development. In concluding, we draw out implications for the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. We argue that a just approach is essential to living within environmental limits, with greater synergies needed between collective action and social practice approaches. While justice can be unpacked for practical and political reasons into access and allocation, we find that (procedural) access considerations are more politically palatable in practice than a concern with allocation (distributive justice), which remains much more contested. As such, dominant approaches promote 'conservative' or thin market-based notions of justice. We conclude by noting that just allocation is a precondition to just access. A failure to prioritize and achieve more corrective and distributive forms of justice will, without doubt, contribute to exacerbating global ecological degradation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of nonzero conjectural variations in pollution abatement and output make emission taxes less effective with respect to reducing emissions. This has implications for the characterization of the optimal emission tax, particularly in an international context where there are large asymmetries in pollution intensities. A higher degree of collusion in output between polluting firms results in higher emissions taxes in the non-cooperative equilibrium. In contrast, a higher degree of collusion in abatement between polluting firms results in lower emissions taxes in the non-cooperative equilibrium. These results rely on the presence of nonzero conjectural variations and large asymmetries in pollution intensities across countries. The analysis is relevant to the design of international environmental policy, including cases where countries face increasing global competition and damages from rising global emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UNFCCC and Paris Climate Agreement set the environmental agenda for many years to come, making environmental protection a global trend. Herewith, these documents created many unprecedented challenges for business, shifting the focus from the original role of commercial benefit to the trade-off between profit and social responsibility. The need to adapt business strategies to the existing agenda has created new requirements for shaping the investment environment. In this aspect, there arises the question regarding the organizational and legal form the investment activities can be carried out in and what additional regulatory instruments can be applied to simplify the procedure for attracting environmental investments. In the current conditions, corporate investment funds may be considered as promising instruments for achieving the goals of international climate agreements. The study suggests that corporate investment funds can become an effective tool for attracting environmental investments. The study purpose is to assess the role of corporate investment funds in international climate agreements goals achievement, to consider the possibility of development strategies to improve management efficiency in the corporate investment funds in terms of their linkage to UNFCCC, Paris Climate Agreement and in a comparative perspective. The study methodology is based on the analysis of world and Russian law enforcement practices in the corporate activities field through the application of a systematic approach. The relationship between corporate governance represented by big businesses and the state is considered in the framework of the investment mechanism and the institutional environment, which is visualized in the model of the business landscape of a corporate investment fund in order to determine management strategies in the operation and development of a corporate investment fund. The study results can be put into practice by financial market participants and other entities in order to increase the efficiency of the use of assets and knowledge of national jurisdictions in the context of world and Russian practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the current trends in the trade union movement in chosen countries, their influence on the formation of the environmental agenda, as well as their ability to adapt the activities of trade unions to new challenges. Based on the example of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries the paper explores the role of trade unions in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) achievement. The analytical cut concerns the issues of the environmental component. The issue is considered from the perspective of the international environmental agreements as a tool to achieve such goals (Paris Climate Agreement, UNFCCC, Aarhus Convention). Since the results of the study showed that in the post-Soviet countries labor unions are deprived of a wide range of rights in the field of policy development, certain ways of development, and increasing their role in the context of adjustment to the SDGs in the field of ecology are proposed. This study is of interest to lawyers practicing in several fields at once, as it makes a significant contribution to the science of comparative law from the perspective of considering the relationship between environmental protection law, labor law, international policy, and legal initiatives on the SDGs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is substantiated the need to modernize the transport area of Ukraine in the view of state obligations adopted during the signing of international environmental agreements. It is argued that the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its further implementation by the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement require the signatory States to take measures to minimize the anthropogenic impact of CO2 emissions in the earth’s atmosphere. A comparative analysis of the qualitative and quantitative composition of the fleet of transport industries of European countries and Ukraine proves that the minimization of environmental pollution by Ukraine should be done by renewal the fleet. Based on the statistics of the quality fleet of transport industries of European countries that practice CO2 emissions and those that who does not tax harmful CO2 emissions, it is demonstrated the dependence of the age — related conditions of the fleet, where the taxation demonstrates its incentive properties to modernize transport industries and renew fleets to modern vehicles. The characterization of global trends in minimizing of harmful emissions into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases gave a reason to argue that the implementation of an environmental tax has a dual nature. On the one hand, the tax encourages owners of enterprises, institutions, organizations of transport industry to invest in environmentally friendly transport to minimize the tax burden, and on the other hand, the taxation influences on the environmental situation in the regions and on the planet as a whole. It is substantiated that regulations aimed at minimizing harmful emissions into the atmosphere allow at the state level to implement policies on the formation, distribution and use of tax revenues for fighting climate change. It is concluded that tax revenues from the taxation of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere can be used to support the transport industry through public-private partnerships. It also emphasizes that Ukraine should intensify international cooperation and agree with developed countries to support the modernization of the Ukrainian transport industry using financial mechanisms and technology transfer agreements to increase resistance to climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions enshrined in the Paris Agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The network of international environmental agreements (IEAs) has been characterized as a complex adaptive system (CAS) in which the uncoordinated responses of nation states to changes in the conditions addressed by particular agreements may generate seemingly coordinated patterns of behavior at the level of the system. Unfortunately, since the rules governing national responses are ill understood, it is not currently possible to implement a CAS approach. Polarization of both political parties and the electorate has been implicated in a secular decline in national commitment to some IEAs, but the causal mechanisms are not clear. In this paper, we explore the impact of polarization on the rules underpinning national responses. We identify the degree to which responsibility for national decisions is shared across political parties and calculate the electoral cost of party positions as national obligations under an agreement change. We find that polarization typically affects the degree but not the direction of national responses. Whether national commitment to IEAs strengthens or weakens as national obligations increase depends more on the change in national obligations than on polarization per se. Where the rules governing national responses are conditioned by the current political environment, so are the dynamic consequences both for the agreement itself and for the network to which it belongs. Any CAS analysis requires an understanding of such conditioning effects on the rules governing national responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract. There is substantiated the need to modernize the transport area of Ukraine in the view of state obligations adopted during the signing of international environmental agreements. It is argued that the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its further implementation by the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement require the signatory States to take measures to minimize the anthropogenic impact of CO2 emissions in the earth’s atmosphere. A comparative analysis of the qualitative and quantitative composition of the fleet of transport industries of European countries and Ukraine proves that the minimization of environmental pollution by Ukraine should be done by renewal the fleet. Based on the statistics of the quality fleet of transport industries of European countries that practice CO2 emissions and those that who does not tax harmful CO2 emissions, it is demonstrated the dependence of the age — related conditions of the fleet, where the taxation demonstrates its incentive properties to modernize transport industries and renew fleets to modern vehicles. The characterization of global trends in minimizing of harmful emissions into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases gave a reason to argue that the implementation of an environmental tax has a dual nature. On the one hand, the tax encourages owners of enterprises, institutions, organizations of transport industry to invest in environmentally friendly transport to minimize the tax burden, and on the other hand, the taxation influences on the environmental situation in the regions and on the planet as a whole. It is substantiated that regulations aimed at minimizing harmful emissions into the atmosphere allow at the state level to implement policies on the formation, distribution and use of tax revenues for fighting climate change. It is concluded that tax revenues from the taxation of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere can be used to support the transport industry through public-private partnerships. It also emphasizes that Ukraine should intensify international cooperation and agree with developed countries to support the modernization of the Ukrainian transport industry using financial mechanisms and technology transfer agreements to increase resistance to climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions enshrined in the Paris Agreement. Keywords: climate change, harmful CO2 emissions, transport area, vehicles, international environmental agreements, regulations, environmental tax. JEL Classification F21, E62, K32, K34, R42, R48 Formulas: 0; fig.: 0; tabl.: 6; bibl.: 16.

This paper examines the effects of political pressure groups (lobbies) on transboundary emissions of individual countries and on the stability of international environmental agreements to reduce emissions. We consider two types of lobbies, industry and environmentalists, and we allow for asymmetric countries to consider differences in lobby strengths to study strategic international spillovers of national lobby activities. In our model, lobby groups in countries that are non-signatories to the agreement will impact abatement of the lobby's home country only. In contrast, lobby activities in signatory countries have spillover effects on the abatement decisions of other member countries. As lobby strength impacts abatement, it will, in turn, impact the incentives to participate in the agreement. We find that lobby activities from both lobby groups, industry and environmentalists, can have the potential to facilitate international cooperation to abate global pollution. This, however, depends on the distribution of lobby activities across countries and on whether green lobby groups have a national or international focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analytically compares the effectiveness of internal and external transfers in encouraging participants in international environmental agreements (IEAs). We divide countries into two homogeneous groups: developed and developing countries. Further, we assume that strong asymmetries exist in their abatement benefits and costs. Using the non-cooperative game model of coalition formation, our result shows that both types of transfers can enlarge the size of self-enforcing coalitions, and the external transfers are always preferred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars commonly hypothesize that enhanced capacity—improved ability to do as agreed—increases states' compliance with international agreements. In contrast, using a novel dataset that covers 31 states and three decades of cooperation, I find a negative effect of capacity on compliance. To help explain this seemingly counterintuitive finding, I offer a novel conjecture of the capacity–compliance relationship. In particular, I argue that the effect of capacity may vary substantially across states, because states' intention to comply constitutes a crucial intervening variable. Among reluctant states pursuing policy goals that affect compliance negatively, high capacity may in fact cause noncompliance. I exemplify the conjecture through evidence from a high-capacity noncompliant state (Norway). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the impact of the timing of adaptation on the stability of international environmental agreements (IEAs) for different levels of cooperation. This issue is addressed by solving a three-stage coalition formation game in a Nash-Cournot setting. In the first stage, countries decide non-cooperatively on their participation in an IEA. Then, depending on the timing, countries decide on adaptation and emissions in the second and third stage. The game is solved for three levels of cooperation. Countries can either cooperate on emissions (emission agreement), on adaptation (adaptation agreement), or both actions (complete agreement). When emissions are chosen first, this extension to an emission–adaptation game is a generalization of the pure emission game. However, when adaptation is chosen first, the grand coalition is stable, provided that countries sign a complete agreement. With partial cooperation, stable coalitions are small. The results establish a connection between the strategic role of adaptation, the levels of adaptation of non-signatories and signatories for the different types of agreements and the participation in an IEA. Moreover, the results indicate that the grand coalition is stable even when it significantly enhances net benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how a voluntary participation decision in international environmental negotiations affects the endogenous authority structure in a federation. In our model, the federal government of each country decides whether to delegate both the decision to participate in a negotiation that determines the abatement level of pollution (the level of the public good), and the negotiation itself, to a regional government of the polluter region. We show that there exists a subgame perfect equilibrium in which none of the federal governments chooses delegation, which is quite different from the authority structure in the absence of a voluntary participation decision. The main contribution is to explain why the federal government has an incentive not to delegate decisions to a regional government [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economists have long argued over the political economy of tradable emission permits, especially the political pressure of lobby groups on international environmental agreements. However, little attention has been paid to the effects of cross-national lobbying on this market. Here, we examine how an international lobby group can affect national and international climate policies concerning international market for emission permits. It extends the common agency model of policy-making to multiple-agency relationships in the context of international environment agreements. The main questions are (1) to what extent are governments' rent-seeking incentives affected through international lobbying? (2) how do domestic and global emissions change in the presence of an international lobby group? We present a three-stage non-cooperative game in which international and national lobbies try to influence governments both when the governments decide on the formation of the international market and when each country chooses the number of permits. We find the condition under which the formation of an international lobby group can raise the contributions of national lobbies which support an international market and hence bring more benefits to the government. We also show that domestic and total emission levels not only depend on the aggregate levels of organized stakes in all countries but also on the distribution of stakes among individual lobby groups that form an international lobby group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The threat of climate catastrophes has been shown to radically change optimal climate policy and prospects for international climate agreements. We characterize the strategic behavior in emissions mitigation and agreement participation with a potential climate catastrophe happening at a temperature threshold. Players are heterogeneous in a conceptual and two numerical models. We confirm that thresholds can induce large, stable coalitions. The relationship between the location of the threshold and the potential for cooperation is non-linear, with the highest potential for cooperation at intermediate temperature thresholds located between 2.5 and 3 degrees of global warming. We find that some regions such as Europe, the USA and China are often pivotal to keeping the threshold because the rest of the world abandons ambitious mitigation and the threshold is crossed without their participation. As a result, their incentives to cooperate can be amplified at the threshold. This behavior critically depends on the characteristics of the threshold as well as the numerical model structure. Conversely, non-pivotal regions are more likely to free-ride as the threshold inverts the strategic response of the remaining coalition. Moreover, we find that our results depend on which equilibrium concepts is applied to analyze coalition formation as well as the introduction of uncertainty about the threshold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of recent international environmental regimes including the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction rely on soft law featuring voluntary action, wide-ranging provisions for participants and non-binding commitments, while skirting the idea of sanctions. Because of the increasing prevalence of soft law regimes, their intuitional design attributes and characteristics give rise to new questions about regime effectiveness. Concepts such as compliance and participation that originate from the assessment of the effectiveness of hard law regimes need to be revisited and adapted to this new subset with its distinct characteristics. The aim of this study, then, is to empirically investigate the prospects of effectiveness in the specific case of the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005–2015 on disaster risk reduction (DRR) as an illustrative case study of soft law regimes. The study, thereby, examines participation and compliance as key factors of regime effectiveness by analysing data and descriptive statistics based on national reports and their indicators on DRR measures. The study not only aims to advance the understanding of concepts central to the assessment of regime effectiveness in the context of soft law regimes. It also investigates DRR for the first time on a global scale from a regime effectiveness perspective documenting variation on the country level and serving as a guide to interesting cases and comparative research for future study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Free riding incentives make it difficult to control climate change. To improve the chances of the Paris Agreement’s ambitious goal, many nations are forming scientific networks in carbon capture and storage (CCS). These networks take many forms (bilateral, hub-and-spoke, and multilateral). Studies of social interactions among scientists demonstrate that research networks are limited because of relational issues, such as lack of trust. This paper provides a rationale for the formation of various types of international CCS networks and examines their impacts on climate change. Our concept of stability focuses on Nash equilibria that are immune to coalitional deviations in overlapping networks. Players may belong to various research networks. A particular research network is a climate club. We show that in the absence of top-down coordination in clubs, the type of global network that forms depends on relational attrition. The complex task is to mitigate free riding while enhancing trust.

We examine the economic factors that lead to the formation of multilateral environmental agreements, focusing on the likelihood a pair of countries enters into an agreement as well as the number of agreements they share using a near universe of agreements. Two countries are more likely to have an agreement and have more of them if they are economically larger and of similar economic size, closer in distance, have a preferential trade agreement, and trade more. Results are strongest for agreements involving a small number of countries, consistent with a hypothesis that agreements are formed to manage common pool resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]