EAPCCO, Environmental Crime and the Challenges of Environmental Diplomacy
blurb:isstoday:19032008eapcco
19 March 2008: EAPCCO, Environmental Crime and the Challenges of Environmental Diplomacy
Environmental diplomacy and environmental crime policy issues were principally debated about after the end of the cold war, when statesmen, academics and policy makers alike talked about global change questions like the sustainable development of the South, population challenges, democratization the internationalization of human rights, and the looming global environmental crisis.
When the Rio Summit of 1992 was convened, environmental and development policy were put at the top of the international agenda. This meeting of plenipotentiaries and heads of states was a landmark in the history of environmental diplomacy. For the first time the environment was treated as a major policy issue in domestic and foreign policy.
Unfortunately, however, environmental diplomacy has taken on a procedural form resulting in a proliferation of agreements that seek to remedy threats to the environment. Few of those agreements have translated into meaningful change. National Interest and strategic diplomatic maneuverings have characterized environmental diplomacy. The environmental agenda has been decelerated by this politicking, and the threat to its sustainability has, if anything, increased as a result.
There seems in all this to be a lack of appreciation of the fact that environmental dangers are global in scale, trans-boundary in nature and affect all people everywhere. Part of the problem is the cumulative nature of environmental change. For example, annual variations in global climatic change are relatively small, and are therefore easily overshadowed by more dramatic and seemingly more important challenges.
A factor that arguably presents the greatest set of difficulties to environmental diplomats, policymakers and practitioners is that threats to the environment are characterized by a high degree of empirical uncertainty. Often the perceived threats and vulnerabilities are theoretical and remote and the evidence can appear incomplete or contradictory. It is extremely difficult to measure, much less predict, long term vulnerabilities. For example, assessing the extent of species extinction (which is singled out as a major issue in environmental crime), is complicated by the fact that most species have not yet been identified.
As a result of such dynamics, policymakers and political decision-makers have little choice but to place the environmental agenda on the cost benefit analysis scale, sieving out the genuinely critical ‘environmental concerns’ and ‘qualified environmental crimes’ from among the wide range of issues placed on the agenda. This is a skill that those involved in the new program on Environmental crime in collaboration with EAPCCO (the East African Police Chiefs Cooperation Organization) in Nairobi will have to come to terms with if they are to make a genuine impact. Those involved should need little more motivation than the recognitions that environmental change is one of the few existential threats facing humanity today.
Philip Arthur Njuguna Mwanika, Junior Researcher: Arms Management Programme, ISS Nairobi
