We acknowledged years ago that climate change is worsening, as already prospected by the latest IPCC report. In this article, it is argued that transforming the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) into a World Environment Organization (WEO) can provide a stronger international political structure for imminent action.
Climate Change and its socioeconomic impact
The rise of the Industrial Revolution in late XVIII century Europe is often recognized by earth scientists as the starting point of the “Anthropocene” – that is, an unofficial unit of geological time used to delineate the epoch characterized by a vast-scale environmental impact deriving from human activity. Despite having its roots in centuries of human action, humankind’s awareness of having entered a new historical era – and the subsequent responsibilities deriving from it – have only begun to form in the second half of the XX century, thus resulting in a profound and immediate need for concrete steps to be taken in order to mitigate the environmental degradation which over two centuries of irresponsible industrial growth have caused. Among the most devastating environmental issues requiring urgent global attention lies climate change: a natural phenomenon that characterized Earth throughout its history, but acquired a particular relevance with the rapid global warming resulting from the increase in the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses caused by human activity since the mid-XX century.
This article will not further deal with the scientific explanations behind climate change, as it is not the overall aim of the work; instead, it is important to stress the social and economic effects into which climate change translates itself; as stated in one of the latest McKinsey reports: “…countries are expected to experience an increase in at least one major type of impact on their stock of human, physical, and natural capital by 2030. Intensifying climate hazards could put millions of lives at risk, as well as trillions of dollars of economic activity and physical capital, and the world’s stock of natural capital.”
Geographical Impact of Climate Change
As climate change will (initially) affect some countries more than others, those states in particularly disadvantaged geographic positions will experience greater challenges to their socioeconomic conditions, which will in turn translate into new waves of global migrations and the social, cultural, and political tensions deriving from them – such points of tension are best seen in South Asia and Small Island States: the country of Bangladesh, with two thirds of its territory less than five meters above sea level and 28% of its population living on coastal areas, is estimated to have 11% of its territory below sea level by 2050 (with an estimated sea level increase of 50cm); this, along with other factors related to climate change, might cause the displacement of almost 15% of the total population of one of the highest fertility rate countries in the world, and possibly leading to tensions with neighboring India and Myanmar in the process of integrating Muslim Bangladeshi “would-be refugees” into the predominantly Hindu/Buddhist population of the area. Small Island countries face even greater threats, as some of them might completely be submerged in the next decades due to the rising sea levels – scientists estimate that Tuvalu could become uninhabitable within the next 50 to 100 years; the Maldives also face the threat of disappearing completely by 2100, along with several other Pacific and Indian Ocean states. Together with the short-run dramatic effects that uncontrolled climate change would have in some specific areas of the world, long-run effects would likely affect the whole planet with irreversible consequences. It is therefore in the interest of the whole international community to tackle the issue firmly and consistently. As mentioned at the beginning of this section, the increasing threat played by Climate Change has only been acknowledged in the second half of the XIX century; let us now turn to analyze the ways in which Climate Change has been dealt with in the international arena.
Climate Change in the international institutional framework: UNEP & UNFCCC
The efforts of Canadian diplomat Maurice Strong at the beginning of the ’70s led to the 1972 Stockholm Conference, in which the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) was established: “…the leading environmental authority that sets the global environmental agenda, promotes the coherent implementation of the environmental dimension of sustainable development within the United Nations system, and serves as an authoritative advocate for the global environment.”
The creation of the UNEP served as a founding pillar in the international institutional effort to tackle climate change, as it provided a proper organization in which states could promote a process of environmental debate and integration. In 1988 the UNEP together with the World Meteorological Organization established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), having the task of providing “policymakers with regular scientific assessments on climate change, its implications and potential future risks, as well as to put forward adaptation and mitigation options”; the first Assessment report of the IPCC in 1990 provided the scientific basis for the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992, which carried 3 important implications:
- Setting the objective of stabilizing GHG concentrations in the atmosphere at a “responsible level” → developed and major developing countries had to reduce their emissions to 1990 levels by 2000.
- Creating the “Common but differentiated responsibilities” (CBDR) principle → all states had to tackle global warming, but developed states should have helped developing ones in achieving sustainable development.
- Allowing for the adoption of a legally binding protocol addressing climate change and promoting negotiations led to the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.
The Kyoto Protocol was a major achievement, for it imposed quantitative limitations on emissions from developed countries to be achieved within a certain time limit. However, despite the high number of developed ratifying countries, the US retreat from the treaty and developing countries’ opposition to it (which by the beginning of the 21st century constituted about 50% of GHG emissions) greatly limited its effectiveness (Luomi, 2020)1.
In 2007 the Bali Action Plan focused on creating a second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol (the first being 2008-2012) as well as ensuring a long-term cooperative action within the UNFCCC including those countries that hadn’t ratified the Kyoto protocol (USA in primis); this two-sided approach enjoyed some important successes – such as the creation of “thematic building blocks” into which to divide actions tackling climate change – but it ultimately failed in making developing countries commit to reduce their emissions, as the latter kept promoting the “historical responsibility” doctrine shifting the burden of environmental action on developed countries entirely. This failure manifested itself at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, in which developing countries ultimately refused to follow binding criteria that would have drawn them closer to developed ones, opting instead for an Accord (Copenhagen Accord) which was not legally binding and had no ambitious long-term goals.
With the Kyoto Agreement coming to an end, the Doha Amendment of 2012 provided for a second commitment period lasting from 2013 to 2020; in the meantime, UNEP, and several NGOs and countries worked together to create an agreement able to include all members of the international community. These efforts led in 2015 to the Paris Agreement: the first treaty having legally binding obligations on emissions reductions for all countries, advocating for developed countries’ leading role in the fight against climate change and environmental degradation while simultaneously involving developing ones in the pursuit of sustainable growth and environmental awareness. This agreement has the aim of holding “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and (pursuing) efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” by achieving a climate-neutral world by mid-century. The agreement intends to achieve this through a double approach:
- A bottom-up system of “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs): each country has to prepare its own 5-year plan for climate action (every 5 years), with each plan having to be more ambitious than the previous one.
- A 5-yearly top-down “Global Stocktake” (review) assessing collective efforts in fighting climate change, with each country being able to propose improvements and policies.
However, despite the quasi-universal commitment to the Paris Agreement (the US rejoined in 2021 after Trump’s withdrawal in late 2020), most scientists agree that the current targets set by countries are not enough, for current policies will lead to an estimated increase of 2.7% in global temperatures by 2100, leading to disastrous consequences for the planet. It is therefore clear that more radical measures will need to be taken.
A stronger stance against climate change: from the UNEP to the WEO
The UNEP has in the last decades gone through a series of important structural reforms shaping its nature and that of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) – UNEP’s governing body. These reforms had the task of better enabling the UNEP to fulfil its 3 main functions: 2
- Scientific function: providing constant scientific advocacy on the environmental problems affecting the international system (drafting reports on a regular basis; organizing meetings and conferences addressing such reports).
- Policy function: overseeing and coordinating multilateral cooperation by establishing a proper institutional and regulatory framework able to provide guidelines on the environmental policies to be pursued.
- Catalytic function: promoting environmental cooperation between countries and organizations; ensuring the implementation of environmental policies at both the international and national levels.
These three core functions of the UNEP ideally stimulate the creation of a virtuous cycle (identifying environmental issues → providing ways with which to tackle the issues → ensuring the implementation of the policies that would tackle the issues) able to properly address environmental problems by regularly renovating the international debate through scientific reports, which review the world’s environmental conditions and the policies pursued internationally, in turn correcting such policies or recommending new strategies for countries to better tackle the issues discussed. Despite this seemingly effective structure of the UNEP, the organization is proving itself unable to properly execute the task for which it was created: the 2022 Emissions Gap Report further confirmed that the targets set by the Paris Agreement are far from being achieved: the world must cut its emissions by 45% – compared to the projections based on current policies – in order to avoid a global environmental catastrophe.
It is necessary to address the long-standing necessity to improve the tackling of climate change expressed by politicians and experts throughout the last four decades, and it does it by drawing on the vast academic literature on environmental governance. The current academic debate on UNEP’s reforms will be introduced shortly, and it will serve as a starting point to develop the topic of UNEP’s reformation – in the following section of this work. By analyzing its history, we can list four main problems that affect the UNEP and consequently hinder the organization’s effectiveness in tackling climate change:
- Overall fragmentation of international environmental governance: lack of coordination between the UNEP and the several environmental programs individually pursued by UN specialized agencies (FAO, UNIDO, etc.), often resulting in overlapping and ineffective policies. limited budget and personnel (core financing has further decreased for the 2022-2023 biennium (UNEP, 2022). The financing increasingly relies on earmarked funds.
- Limited budget and personnel (core financing has further decreased for the 2022-2023 biennium (UNEP, 2022)) → financing increasingly relying on earmarked funds.
- “Soft law nature” of environmental international treaties: lack of proper enforcement mechanisms able to ensure State compliance (resulting in the inability to achieve the standards set by the treaties previously described).
- Lack of political legitimacy: political support is subject to the “currents” of IR and the often different conflicting national interests.
There are several other issues with which the UNEP will have to deal in order to transform itself into a truly effective organization – such as the efficiency of the mechanisms regulating its internal governance and actors3; this paper will leave those organizational issues to more able experts, focusing instead on the political and (in part) legal frameworks within which the UNEP operates. While the academic debate on how to overcome the constraints currently affecting the UNEP is divided into several currents of thought, this article will adopt an approach serving as a way in between the “Creationist approach” (advocating for the establishment of a new organization in addition to the UNEP) and the “Status-quo approach” (arguing that the UNEP should remain a UN programme); this “Middle-way approach” will serve as a good compromise between the two most popular approaches, for it supports the transformation of the UNEP into a UN specialized agency, thereby not creating a new organization nor downgrading the current, but reforming the already existing one. I believe this to be the best solution for a more effective international environmental governance, and I think WEO (World Environment Organization) is the best name for such an organization, as it would share traits with the WHO.
Let us now analyze the characteristics that this reformed agency should have, focusing on both its technical capabilities (resources, mandate and organizational design) and political appeal, hence explaining how a UN specialized agency would be able to overcome the four major constraints – mentioned before – currently affecting the UNEP.
WEO’s Structure
Unlike programs, UN specialized agencies are given an autonomous status which allows them to:
- have their own charter (to be ratified by all of the agency’s member states).
- rely on mandatory financial contributions by all member states.
- have an independent agency head overseeing the organization’s work, and a governing board elected within the agency subject to the sole control of the agency’s head4.
These three characteristics allow specialized agencies to function as international “standard-setting” and project-implementing organizations, able to independently provide stable norms for issues having a transnational nature. Given the par excellence transnational nature of environmental degradation, upgrading the UNEP to a specialized agency – the WEO – would greatly improve its ability to deal with climate change, by allowing the organization to:
IMPROVE COORDINATION OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE (PROBLEM N.1)
The creation of a single powerful organization would stop the fragmentation of environmental law characterizing the last decades – for the WEO would function as an “umbrella organization” under which to streamline the several regimes and treaties; the organization’s monopoly over environmental programmes would also shift the burden away from the several specialized agencies currently implementing each their own environmental programme, allowing for the implementation of a single coherent strategy.
Increase the organization’s technical capabilities (problems n.2 & n.3)
Budget
Assessed contributions by member states constitute the basis of UN specialized organizations’ funds; these mandatory contributions provide a regular and solid basis which allows the organization to pursue policies in complete autonomy – unlike UN programmes, (the current UNEP) which mostly have to rely on inconstant voluntary contributions often tied to member states’ geopolitical interests. Transforming the UNEP into the WEO would thus allow it to increase its budget (and personnel consequently), by forcing every member state to regularly contribute to the organization’s budget.
Mandate
Specialized agencies are better able to execute two important functions5:
- regime-building: by autonomously drafting new treaties (the ILO with its “ILO conventions”).
- norm-setting: approving particular regulations – which would then have a binding effect on all member states – with the sole need of qualified majority voting (art. 20,21 of the WHO). The WEO would thus better contribute to developing an international regulatory framework for climate change, as the organization could adopt legally binding treaties and regulations – unlike the UNEP, which can only initiate international negotiations.
Organizational design
Similar to all specialized agencies, the WEO would have the ability to shape its own organizational structure (by having its own charter), set its own budget, choose its member states, and implement the programmes it wants; all such activities would be coordinated by a governing board (elected internally by the agency’s m.s.), and ultimately overseen by an independent agency head – unlike the UNEP, which has to submit its programmes and activities to the UN secretary general, and be subject to his/her decisions. The WEO’s ability to have its own charter could provide an important normative framework for environmental governance – as the organization would be able to develop a properly binding “Charter for the Environment” that could be inspired by the World Charter for Nature (1982) and the Earth Charter (2000) – thereby promoting innovative concepts, such as the “right of nature”, on the international stage. The agency’s capacity to choose its own organizational structure would better allow it to shape itself so as to best execute the tasks for which it was created – the three tasks previously described at the beginning of this third section of the work (scientific, policy, catalytic).
I will not deal in detail with the structure of the WEO (it could share several traits with other specialized agencies like the WHO or the ILO); however, I believe that the creation of an International Court of the Environment (ICE) would be a major departure from the UNEP’s structural weakness, for it would allow the WEO to ensure compliance over environmental regimes thanks to its ability to create enforcement mechanisms6. This would allow international environmental law to shift from an essentially soft (and ineffective) law to a hard one, thereby tackling the historical (environment-wise) gap between (state) commitments and actions. The ICE would be to the WEO what the Court of Justice is to the UN, and it would include both state and non-state actors – given the increasingly important role played by the latter in environmental issues. Finally, the ability to elect its own governing board would allow the WEO to create a body mirroring the composition of the UN Security Council, solving one of the major issues currently affecting the UNEP: lack of political legitimacy.
Increase the organization’s political legitimacy (problem n.4)
Political legitimacy in global governance is mainly provided by 2 kinds of actors: developing great powers, and developed great powers; if an organization is able to obtain recognition from these two types of actors it will automatically gain international legitimacy, for smaller players would follow in the footsteps of bigger ones thereby supporting the organization. When thinking of ways to reform the UNEP, it is therefore fundamental to take into account the (often opposing) interests of both developed and developing great powers; let us now analyze what I believe to be the best way of doing this.
The last “great powers officialization” within the international arena corresponds to the creation of the UN Security Council shortly after WWII. The latter was an organ gathering all “victorious powers” (with the exception of France and China, serving as strategic partners) having the task of guiding the post-war world order.
As decades went by, those international power balances that had inspired the composition of the UN Security Council slowly changed, leading to the organ’s, and consequently the UN itself, gradual loss of international legitimacy, for it did not reflect actual international power relations. The growing issue of ensuring international legitimacy to the UN led, at the beginning of the XXI century, to an important academic debate on ways to reform its security council.
The debate generally agreed on the need to find a major event that would have provided moral and political justification to initiate the needed Security Council’s reform; I believe the creation of the WEO to create the circumstances able to serve as an initiator for reforming the UN Security Council.
In fact, transforming the UNEP into a UN-specialized agency (the WEO) would allow the institution to have a governing board with significant power. The international prestige and such international relevance would consequently provide an appeal to membership in the WEO’s governing board, similar to the one held by membership in the UN Security Council. By then structuring the WEO’s governing body so as to mirror the composition of the UN S.C. (that is, with the same major powers now constituting the “Big Five” in the UN), the parallel between the two institutions would further consolidate itself, thereby strengthening the WEO by transposing the realist logic used within the UN general assembly to the WEO, which would lead to a competition between status-quo powers (part of the security council/governing board represented by developed countries) and revisionist powers (willing to be part of the security council/governing board represented by developing countries). This competition would, however, shift from “classic security” (military, economic) to environmental security – status-quo powers would be willing to engage in environmental efforts in order to strengthen their position within the WEO and further legitimize the one in the UN security council (especially since several members of the UN security council are declining powers unable to legitimize their position in “classic security” terms). Revisionist powers would instead engage in environmental efforts so as to consolidate their position in the WEO and be more credible “candidates” for the UN security council.
Given the “young age” of the newly established WEO, discourses and conflicts regarding membership in its governing board would be much weaker than the long-existing ones entangling the UN Security Council, leading to easier prospects of reforms. That is, changing the WEO’s governing board by including rising powers; membership in the WEO’s governing board could then be seen by revisionist powers as a first step towards international recognition. By partly shifting the discourse on the requisites needed to be a great power, the WEO would further gain political legitimacy, and major international players (polluters) would pay greater attention to their environmental policies. Furthermore, developing countries – historically against environmental regimes, perceived as an impediment to their development – would benefit from supporting the WEO, for the organization’s ability to serve as major a “watchdog” (given its power and international prestige) would protect developing countries, often having weaker legal systems, from major state and non-state actors breaching environmental regimes in the countries’ territory.
The Future is WEO
To sum up, I argue that transforming the UNEP into a UN-specialized agency – the WEO – would strengthen Global Environmental Governance, thereby providing a stronger stance against climate change. Specifically, creating a WEO governing board mirroring that of the UN Security Council would stimulate major developing countries to increase their efforts in tackling climate change.
This article is drawn from the author’s original work published online where references can be found.
Rethinking Climate 
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