Environmental policy is often practiced reactively with each crisis addressed as an isolated event. Focusing on development of proactive policies, Global Environment Policy: Concepts, Principles, and Practice provides the essential scientific and socioeconomic framework for formulating pragmatic and comprehensive environmental policies. It discusses topics of interest to American and international audiences. Beginning with basic concepts, the book proceeds successively on to more advanced principles, theories, and practices for developing and implementing comprehensive environmental policy solutions. Topics are introduced in a logical, yet connected, user-friendly manner. Using practical case studies and examples, the book illustrates both the power and limitations of theoretical approaches. It defines the scope and nature of the environmental policy problem, outlining its origins and evolution, and introduces the policy frameworks of the United Nations, European Union, and the United States. Each chapter begins with a case study and ends with a problem set; the questions are designed to elicit practical and critical thinking. The book ends with two capstone problems that exemplify nearly every major topic and aspect presented in this book. Upon completion, students should possess the competency required to examine a real world problem, evaluate it in terms of the concepts, principles, and tools described throughout the book, and develop a practical policy solution for resolving that problem.

Economics, Ethics, and Environmental Policy: Contested Choices offers a comprehensive analysis of the ethical problems associated with basing environmental policy on economic analysis, and ways to overcome these problems.

This publication, a joint initiative of the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST) and the UNESCO Division of Ethics of Science and Technology, contains essays written by eight leading international experts in this relatively new inter-disciplinary area of applied ethics. These papers consider the moral dimensions of environmental management issues and explores proposals for effective international policy-making to promote environmental objectives.

An ethical critique of existing approaches to sustainable development and international environmental cooperation, this book detailes the tensions, normative shifts and contradictions that currently characterize it.

This fully updated and expanded textbook looks at issues including climate change, sustainable development and biodiversity preservation, and sensitively addresses global developments such as the Summits at Durban on climate and at Nagoya on biodiversity.

Weve had 20 years of government-level conferences at Kyoto, Copenhagen and Cancun, but greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. Taking a cosmopolitan approach to climate change in this excellent and timely book, Paul Harris and his contributors argue that citizen action is an essential complement to state action. The challenging, unsettling and absolutely vital argument of these high quality essays is that distance makes no moral difference in our globalised world; individual high emitters have a duty to reduce their emissions, wherever they are. - Andrew Dobson, Keele, University, UK This collection of provocative essays re-evaluates the worlds failed policy responses to climate change, in the process demonstrating how cosmopolitan ethics can inform global environmental governance. A cosmopolitan worldview points to climate-related policies that are less international and more global. From a cosmopolitan perspective, national borders should not delineate obligations and responsibilities associated with climate change. Human beings, rather than the narrow interests of nation-states, ought to be at the centre of moral calculations and policy responses to climate change. In this volume, expert contributors examine questions of individual and global responsibility, burden sharing among people and states, international law and environmental justice, capitalism and voluntary action, pluralist cooperation and hegemony, and alternative approaches to climate action and diplomacy. The book helps to illuminate new principles for global environmental policy that can come from cosmopolitan conceptions of climate change.

Drawing on practices and theories of environmental justice, 'China's responsibility for climate change' describes China's contribution to global warming and analyzes its policy responses. Contributors critically examine China's practical and ethical responsibilities to climate change from a variety of perspectives. They explore policies that could mitigate China's environmental impact while promoting its own interests and meeting the international community's expectations. The book is accessible to a wide readership, including academics, policy makers and activists. All royalties from sales of this book will be donated to Friends of the Earth.

As global capitalism expands and reaches ever-further corners of the world, practical problems continue to escalate and repercussions become increasingly serious and irreversible. These practical problems carry with them equally important and ethical issues. Global Ethics and Environment explores these ethical issues from a range of perspectives and using a wide range of case studies. Chapters focus on: the impact of development in new industrial regions; the ethical relationship between human and non-human nature; the application of ethics in different cultural and institutional contexts; environmental injustice in the location of hazardous materials and processes; the ethics of the impact of a single event (Chernobyl) on the global community; the ethics of transitional institutions. This collection will both stimulate debate and provide an excellent resource for wide-ranging case study material and solid academic context.

Environmental issues raise crucial questions. What should we value? What is our place in nature? What kind of life should we live? How should we interact with other living things? Environmental management and policy-making is ultimately based on answers to these and similar questions, but do we need a new ethics to be able overcome the environmental crisis we face? This book addresses these important questions and explores the values that decision-makers often presuppose in their environmental policy-making. Examining the content of the ethics of sustainable development that the UN and the world’s governments want us to embrace, this book examines alternatives to this kind of ethics, and the differences in basic values that these make in practice. Offering a detailed analysis of the ethics that lie behind current policy-making as it is expressed in documents such as Agenda 21 and the Rio Declaration, this unique contribution to the field of environmental studies shows how different environmental ethical theories support different goals of environmental management and generate different policies when it comes to population growth, agriculture, and preservation and management of wilderness areas and endangered species. Mikael Stenmark concludes that policy-makers must take more seriously the value assumptions and conflicts connected to environmental issues, and state explicitly on what values their own proposals and decisions are based and why these should be accepted. Those studying environmental issues or environmental philosophy will find this accessible text invaluable in presenting a clear understanding of environmental ethics and contemporary applications and policies.

This second edition of International Environmental Law, Policy, and Ethics revises and expands this groundbreaking study into the question of why the environment is protected in the international arena. This question is rarely asked because it is assumed that each member of the international community wants to achieve the same ends. However, in his innovative study of international environmental ethics, Alexander Gillespie explodes this myth. He shows how nations, like individuals, create environmental laws and policies which are continually inviting failure, as such laws can often be riddled with inconsistencies, and be ultimately contradictory in purpose. Specifically, he seeks a nexus between the reasons why nations protect the environment, how these reasons are reflected in law and policy, and what complications arise from these choices. This book takes account of the numerous developments in international environmental law and policy that have taken place the publication of the first edition, most notably at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development and the 2012 'Rio + 20' United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. Furthermore, it addresses recent debates on the economic value of nature, and the problems of the illegal trade in species and toxic waste. The cultural context has also been considerably advanced in the areas of both intangible and tangible heritage, with increasing attention being given to conservation, wildlife management, and the notion of protected areas. The book investigates the ways in which progress has been made regarding humane trapping and killing of animals, and how, in contrast, the Great Apes initiative, and similar work with whales, have failed. Finally, the book addresses the fact that while the notion of ecosystem management has been embraced by a number of environmental regimes, it has thus far failed as an international philosophy.