Robinson, Nicholas A. --- "Reflecting on Rio: Environmental Law in the Coming Decades" [2011] ELECD 641; in Benidickson, Jamie; Boer, Ben; Benjamin, Herman Antonio; Morrow, Karen (eds), "Environmental Law and Sustainability after Rio" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Environmental Law and Sustainability after Rio

Editor(s): Benidickson, Jamie; Boer, Ben; Benjamin, Herman Antonio; Morrow, Karen

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9780857932242

Section: Chapter 2

Section Title: Reflecting on Rio: Environmental Law in the Coming Decades

Author(s): Robinson, Nicholas A.

Number of pages: 22

Extract:

2. Reflecting on Rio: environmental law
in the coming decades
Nicholas A. Robinson

1. INTRODUCTION

Environmental law has matured greatly since the 1972 Stockholm
Conference on the Human Environment. It was given a tremendous boost by
the 1992 Rio de Janeiro UN Conference on Environment and Development
(UNCED, or the `Earth Summit'). Nevertheless, the persistence of excessive
natural resources exploitation and pollution underscores a sobering fact:
environmental law worldwide remains unable to attain its remedial
objectives. Environmental law success stories have occasionally
demonstrated that the legal norms, rules and procedures can work effectively,
but to be globally successful on a continuing basis these legal regimes will
need to be scaled up enormously.
All nations at UNCED agreed upon Agenda 21, an action plan to promote
sustainable development. 1 The urgent need for universal cooperation to
formulate the recommendations of Agenda 21 had been articulated in 1987 in
Our Common Future, the report of the UN World Commission on
Environment and Development (1987). The principles of the 1992 Rio
Declaration on Environment and Development 2 were reaffirmed in
Johannesburg in 2002 at the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development,
adding important recommendations on energy efficiency and on the
alleviation of poverty. 3
In 1987, Our Common Future recommended the robust elaboration of
environmental law, and proposed relevant legal principles in its Annex 1. Yet
even five years later, when Chapter 8 of Agenda 21 called on each nation to
build up its national laws for environment and development, and in Chapters
...