Still Dirty After All These Years: Political Leadership, Knowledge, and Socialization and Regional Environmental Cooperation in Northeast Asia

This dissertation examines the microprocesses of regime creation in Northeast Asia regarding transboundary environmental problems. Despite the growing need for international environmental cooperation and policy coordination at the regional and global levels, Northeast Asia has not yet succeeded in reaching any binding regional agreement on any environmental issue, even though it has developed various environmental cooperative mechanisms regarding transboundary pollution. Rather than characterizing regional environmental cooperative mechanisms in Northeast Asia as “non-regime,” this study unpacks the varying forms of collective action in terms of the speed of development of cooperative mechanisms and the substantive content of the development undertaken by states in the region. The causal relationships between specific forms of political leadership, knowledge, and socialization and the degrees and forms of regional collective action is explored regarding the transboundary air pollution issues of the region, including acid rain, dust and sandstorms, and various long-range transboundary air pollutants. In addition to comparing the participation of countries in this region in broader Northeast Asian cooperative mechanisms, the study also analyzes the differences between European and East Asian experiences on this topic. An analysis of the three cases indicates that all three independent variables areonly partly associated with varying degrees of collective action as measured by formal features and concrete collective action in Northeast Asia. The study’s comparison of the varying degrees of collective action in Northeast Asia and Europe and among the three studied Northeast Asian environmental cooperative mechanisms discovers two useful insights. First, the analysis supports the hypothesis on social mechanisms among political leadership, shared knowledge, and socialization, which asserts that the stronger the political leadership and the greater the shared knowledge in the region, the more likely participants in regional cooperation are to engage in the learning process of socialization and thereby create the most formal and concrete collective action. The study finds that st strong rong political leadership is not itself sufficient to lead member countries to engage in the learning process of socialization and that a lack of shared scientific knowledge is positively associated with the adaption process of socialization among participants in the cooperative activities of these three regional mechanisms. Another insight is that the lack of shared knowledge and of the learning mode of socialization helps explain why all three regional cooperative mechanisms have failed to advance to becomethe legally binding regional environmental regimes rather than the comparatively higher degrees of collective action in terms of formalization and concreteness among regional entities within the UNEP’s second category of regional action. This study argues that knowledge and socialization barriers are key determinants of the development of regulatory regional environmental regimes. Without shared scientific knowledge and engagement in the learning process of socialization, even given strong political leadership by a participating country, it is not likely for a region to develop a legally binding regional environmental regime.Therefore, this study concludes that to make the transformation from the least formal and concrete collective action to the most formal and concrete depends on creating shared knowledge and the learning process of socialization

Towards a New International Law of the Atmosphere?

Inclusion of the topic ‘protection of the atmosphere’ in the current work programme of the UN International Law Commission (ILC) reflects the long overdue recognition of the fact that the scope of contemporary international law for the Earth’s atmosphere extends far beyond the traditional discipline of ‘air law’ as a synonym for airspace and air navigation law. Instead, the atmospheric commons are regulated by a ‘regime complex’ comprising a multitude of economic uses including global communications, pollutant emissions and diffusion, in different geographical sectors and vertical zones, in the face of different categories of risks, and addressed by a wide range of different transnational institutions. Following several earlier attempts at identifying crosscutting legal rules and principles in this field (by, inter alia, the International Law Association, the UN Environment Programme, and the Institut de Droit International), the ILC has now embarked on a new codification/restatement project led by Special Rapporteur Shinya Murase – albeit hamstrung by a highly restrictive ‘understanding’ imposed by the Commission in 2013. This article assesses the prospects and limitations of the initial ILC reports and debates in 2014 and 2015, and potential avenues for progress in the years to come

From Smelter Fumes to Silk Road Winds: Exploring Legal Responses to Transboundary Air Pollution over South Korea

As China‘s industrialization has entered full swing, transboundary pollution has swept eastward across the Manchurian Plain and the Yellow Sea into neighboring Northeast Asian countries. The desertification of Mongolia and Northwestern China due to global warming has fueled seasonal yellow dust storms descending on Korea in increased frequency and intensity in recent years, acting as a vector for various kinds of air pollution. On top of sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide that cause acid deposition which, in turn, destroys crops and forests, southeasterly winds carry fine particulate matter, aerosols, ozone, and heavy metals with more significant negative consequences on the health of humans and other species. Soaring demand for energy in China (supplied mainly by coal-fired power plants) is casting deep uncertainty on regional air quality for the future, given the historically unprecedented scale and pace of deployment of plants in such a densely populated region. It is widely assumed that coal will be China‘s principal source of energy for many decades to come, comprising as much as 70% of energy demand. According to the IEA World Energy Outlook for 2011, China will account for more than half of the global share of coal use in 2020 with conservative assumptions. However, as China rapidly becomes a major world market for internal combustion vehicles, increasing carbon monoxide emissions from vehicles are expected to contribute heavily to transboundary pollution in Asia and overtake power plants as the primary source of air pollution

International Cooperation to Resolve International Pollution Problems

This article provides a non-technical overview of important results of the game theoretical literature on the formation and stability of international environmental agreements (IEAs) on transboundary pollution control. It starts out by sketching features of first and second best solutions to the problem of transboundary pollution. It then argues that most actual IEAs can be considered at best as third best solutions. Therefore, three questions are raised: 1) Why is there a difference between actual IEAs and first and second best solutions? 2) Which factors determine this difference? 3) Which measures can help to narrow this difference? This article attempts to answer these questions after giving an informal introduction to coalition models.International pollution, International environmental agreements, Treaty design, Coalition theory

Impacts of air pollution on human and ecosystem health, and implications for the National Emission Ceilings Directive. Insights from Italy

Across the 28 EU member states there were nearly half a million premature deaths in 2015 as a result of exposure to PM2.5, O3 and NO2. To set the target for air quality levels and avoid negative impacts for human and ecosystems health, the National Emission Ceilings Directive (NECD, 2016/2284/EU) sets objectives for emission reduction for SO2, NOx, NMVOCs, NH3 and PM2.5 for each Member State as percentages of reduction to be reached in 2020 and 2030 compared to the emission levels into 2005. One of the innovations of NECD is Article 9, that mentions the issue of “monitoring air pollution impacts” on ecosystems. We provide a clear picture of what is available in term of monitoring network for air pollution impacts on Italian ecosystems, summarizing what has been done to control air pollution and its effects on different ecosystems in Italy. We provide an overview of the impacts of air pollution on health of the Italian population and evaluate opportunities and implementation of Article 9 in the Italian context, as a case study beneficial for all Member States. The results showed that SO42− deposition strongly decreased in all monitoring sites in Italy over the period 1999–2017, while NO3− and NH4+ decreased more slightly. As a consequence, most of the acid-sensitive sites which underwent acidification in the 1980s partially recovered. The O3 concentration at forest sites showed a decreasing trend. Consequently, AOT40 (the metric identified to protect vegetation from ozone pollution) showed a decrease, even if values were still above the limit for forest protection (5000 ppb h−1), while PODy (flux-based metric under discussion as new European legislative standard for forest protection) showed an increase. National scale studies pointed out that PM10 and NO2 induced about 58,000 premature deaths (year 2005), due to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. The network identified for Italy contains a good number of monitoring sites (6 for terrestrial ecosystem monitoring, 4 for water bodies monitoring and 11 for ozone impact monitoring) distributed over the territory and will produce a high number of monitored parameters for the implementation of the NECD

Barriers to Resolving Transboundary Pollution

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

A spatial econometric model for transboundary air pollution control treaties: an analysis of noncooperative international behavior

This dissertation develops a theoretical model that explains differences in emission reductions of transboundary air pollutants among nations based on national income, political freedom, the cost of emission reductions, emissions from other countries, the type of pollutant, and the pollutant\u27s dispersion characteristics. The model is based on the theory of the private provision of impure public goods. This theoretical model is then used to derive a reduced form demand equation for emission reductions that can be econometrically estimated using spatial autoregressive techniques for time-series cross-section data;The econometric model is applied to 25 European nations and covers the period from 1980 to 1990. These nations were signatories to the 1985 Helsinki Protocol, which mandated reductions in sulfur dioxide (SO2), and the 1988 Sofia Protocol, which limited emissions of nitrogen oxides (NO x). The signing of these treaties indicated a recognition of the problems caused by acid rain and ozone pollution, yet the two treaties had very different requirements regarding emission reductions. By taking into account the differences between nations and the different characteristics of the pollutants, my model allows a closer examination of the reasons for the differences in treaty requirements and treaty adherence;The results indicate that nations follow a Nash-subscription model in choosing their emission reductions. In other words, nations tend to free ride on the emission reductions of other nations. The spatial autoregressive model performs convincingly for SO2, but the model for NO x is less satisfying. While nations continue to exhibit Nash behavior, other variables fail to be significant or have the wrong sign. However, these results may be explained as resulting from the characteristic nature of NO x as compared with SO2. Since it originates from a larger number of sources, it is harder to control than SO2 emissions;A better understanding of the factors that influence a nation\u27s decision to reduce its emissions may provide a foundation for the negotiation of future transboundary pollution control treaties. New treaties could require some nations to make greater (or smaller) cuts in emissions, but by taking into account differences among the nations, larger total reductions and greater compliance might result