![]() ![]() 1 Humanity’s potential stress on the environment is to some extent a function of three key factors: population, resource consumption, and waste production. Global demographic, economic, and environmental macrotrends describe key factors that drive global environmental politics. It highlights key economic and environmental trends, introduces and defines important concepts, and traces some of the major intellectual currents and political developments that have contributed to the evolution of global environmental politics. This chapter provides an introduction to global environmental politics. The realization that environmental threats have serious socioeconomic and human costs and that unilateral actions by individual countries cannot solve these problems produced increased international cooperation aimed at halting or reversing environmental degradation. Many by-products of economic growth-such as the burning of fossil fuels, air and water pollution, hazardous waste, release of substances that destroy stratospheric ozone, production of toxic chemicals, increased use of natural resources, and decreasing forest cover-put cumulative stresses on the physical environment that now threaten human health and economic well-being. Global concern about the environment evolved in response to expanded scientific understanding of humanity’s increasing impact on the biosphere, including the atmosphere, oceans, forests, soil cover, and a large number of animal and plant species. ![]() Today, environmental issues are globally important both in their own right and because they affect other aspects of world politics, including economic development, trade, humanitarian action, social policy, and even security. Then the rise of environmental movements in industrialized countries and the appearance of well-publicized global environmental threats that affect the welfare of all humankind-such as ozone layer depletion, climate change, and dangerous declines in the world’s fisheries-awarded global environmental issues a much higher status in world politics. Until the 1980s, most governments regarded global environmental problems as minor issues, marginal both to their core national interests and to international politics in general. The Emergence of Global Environmental Politics ![]() Global Environmental Politics is vital reading for any student wishing to understand the current state of the field and to make informed decisions about which policies might best safeguard our environment for the future. With new material on the adoption of global Sustainable Development Goals and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development the December 2015 Paris Climate Change conference and recent meetings of major conventions on desertification, biological diversity, and more the authors present a comprehensive overview of contemporary international environmental politics. Through case studies on key issues such as climate change, toxic chemicals, and biodiversity loss, the authors detail the development of major environmental regimes. This new edition continues this tradition while covering critical new developments in the field. For more than twenty years, Global Environmental Politics has provided an up-to-date, accurate, and unbiased introduction to the world's most pressing environmental issues.
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