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S Global Problems and Local Concerns
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Abstract | ocial and environmental problems often spill over national boundaries. Many of the issues described in earlier chapters—risk management in the fragile lands (chapter 4), races for property rights in water and land (chapter 5), urban pollution (chapter 6), and conflict (chapter 7)—have international ramifications. Dealing with them requires the same kind of institutional apparatus described in chapter 3: problems must be detected and diagnosed, and interests must be balanced within and across borders. However, there is one big difference: at the global level, there is no central authority to enforce agreements. Nations have to devise ways to keep themselves on agreed paths. This chapter cannot treat in detail the long, varied , and growing list of challenges that require international cooperation: transboundary river basin management; international fisheries management; control of infectious diseases; mitigation of acid rain; and prevention of armed conflict and terrorism, to name a few. Instead, it draws general lessons from the experience with some environmental problems regarding the design and development of institutions that can handle more difficult transnational issues. Chapter 8 features progress on two transnational environmental problems: protecting the stratospheric ozone layer, and mitigating acid rain in Europe. It applies these lessons to two fundamental but unresolved sustainability issues that are the subjects of controversy and emerging global environmental conventions: mitigating and adapting to climate change, and conserving biodiversity. (A third issue, desertification, is addressed in the context of chapter 4.) Though usually characterized as environmental issues, these problems have causes and solutions with deep social and political roots, and lessons for nonenvironmental global problems. Designing institutions to solve global problems Who would have thought that leaky refrigerators, fire extinguishers, and aerosol spray cans could seriously damage the entire biosphere? The story of how stratospheric ozone depletion was diagnosed as a problem, and how the global community organized to address it, illustrates how adaptive, learning institutions can successfully address global issues. Refrigerators began using chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) around 1930. 1 By 1970 the world used about 1 million tons of these substances each year as coolants, as propellants in aerosol cans, and for manufacturing. In that year, James Lovelock used recently invented techniques to detect trace amounts of CFC in the atmosphere over London. His request for a grant to measure CFC concentrations over the Atlantic was denied: " One reviewer commented that even if the measurement succeeded, he could not imagine a more useless bit … |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dpu-projects/drivers_urb_change/urb_environment/pdf_Sustainability/WorldBank_dvlpt_Report_2003_C8.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
