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Reconsidering the Effectiveness of International Environmental Regimes in the Anthropocene

Despite the increased number of International Environmental Regimes (IERs), gradually worsening environmental indicators have made the effectiveness of regimes a current and controversial issue. Doubtlessly, regimes are one of the most significant tools of global environmental governance. Enabling interstate cooperation, increasing knowledge about ecological problems, keeping these problems on the agenda, and providing relative improvement in some issue areas are the positive outcomes of regimes. However, IERs are institutions that are currently based on the stable and predictable earth system conditions of the Holocene Epoch. Therefore, IERs are unlikely to operate effectively under the unpredictable and unstable conditions of the new, Anthropocene era. Based on this argument, this article attempts to reveal that the effectiveness of regimes depends on their capacity to cope with the challenges of the Anthropocene. Regimes can confront these challenges by adopting a holistic earth system perspective based on the integrity of socio-ecological systems and planetary boundaries.

Reconsidering the Effectiveness of International Environmental Regimes in the Anthropocene
 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

At the dawn of the 50th anniversary of the 1972 Stockholm Conference on March 18, 2022, a turning point in the development of international environmental policies, unprecedented temperatures were recorded simultaneously in the polar zones of Earth. In the face of the abnormal 40°C and 30°C above-average temperatures in Antarctica and the Arctic respectively, calling attention to unpredictable extremes, climatologists highlighted that the temperature expectations in the polar zones should be revised −yet again.1 Almost every day, extreme weather events, such as heavy rainfall, floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornados, landslides, heat waves, and forest fires, occur in different parts of the world. These catastrophic events reveal that the permanent and far-reaching impact of human activity on the planet is causing serious and unpredictable changes in the biophysical processes of the earth system. The magnitude of these human-driven changes has led many scientists to believe that we are about to enter into (or have entered) a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene: an era in which human activity is the dominant factor influencing the climate and the environment,2 and the stable and predictable conditions of the Holocene are left behind. 

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