Stockholm+50 and Beyond – Eight New Contributions Published

16 May 2022 | Amsterdam, NL – The latest issue of Environmental Policy and Law (EPL) is solely dedicated to the special section, Stockholm+50 and Beyond, and includes eight articles from experts in advance of UNEP's milestone event in June 2022, commemorating the 50 years since the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE). Read highlights of the issue in this post.

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15 May 2022

New EPL issue is dedicated entirely to the EPL special section

[Author: Carmel McNamara, IOS Press]

Amsterdam, NL – The latest issue of Environmental Policy and Law (EPL) is solely dedicated to the special section, Stockholm+50 and Beyond, and includes eight articles from experts in advance of UNEP's milestone event in June 2022, commemorating the 50 years since the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE). Read highlights of the issue in this post.

We invite you to read the latest articles published in the EPL special section leading up to the upcoming event in June 2022, which will be an international meeting convened by the United Nations General Assembly, and we highlight a number of other articles that feature in the new issue below. The final contributions to this section will appear in Volume 52, Issue 3.

Snow-capped mountains and lake under a blue sky

EPL Special Section

In every new issue of EPL, the Editor-in-Chief Bharat H. Desai, PhD selects one article to feature online, which is made openly available for you to read, download, and share. In this issue, that honor goes to the contribution by Donald W. Kaniaru, managing partner, Kaniaru & Kaniaru Advocates in Nairobi, Kenya. The article chronicles the inception of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) at the 1972 UNCHE. As noted by Dr. Desai in the paper, the author is “a former Kenyan diplomat was based in New York from 1970, participated in the preparatory process of the 1972 UNCHE, was a staff member of UNEP for about three decades, and served in different capacities with four of the seven executive directors of UNEP. The life of UNEP is almost intertwined with the author’s life. Hence, his first-hand account is very valuable in looking back at UNEP’s 50-year trajectory and to look ahead to the future beyond the 2022 Stockholm+50 event.”

Here, we share an extract of the article: “No doubt UNEP has been unimpeachably successful over the past 50 years... Having been there before, during, and after UNEP, I am able to affirm this. Its role in the United Nations and system is relied on and respected. At civil society and individual levels, invaluable partnership is integral to the success achieved thus far. New standards, laws, and regulations are in place practically in all nations and places; applicable to the atmosphere, oceans, and ecosystems. Indeed, new institutions and machineries drive their processes, and all look to UNEP and extended UN system to explain the phenomenon or endeavors and proclaim unhesitatingly, a better environment, with outstanding determination to outdo the past and shine without limits in the future and beyond.” Read the full openly available article here.

Discover more about the Stockholm+50 and Beyond section!

More Content in EPL Volume 52, Issue 2

This issue begins with the editorial by the Editor-in-Chief Bharat H. Desai, PhD – who is also the curator of the content for the EPL’s “Stockholm+50 and Beyond” section – in which he provides some background to the new content. Here, we give a brief summary of the next three articles:

The article by Jonas Ebbesson, in exploring the trajectory of the human rights approach to environment protection, seeks to discuss international law and governance processes that do not leave anyone behind in the pursuit for sustainable development and prosperity.
The paper by Jordi Jaria-Manzano is an exposition on “beyond sustainability” that is focused on the inability of sustainability to capture the implications of the narrative of planetary transformation, and explores the concept of resilience as alternative.
The contribution by Krishna Prasad Oli, et al. focuses on the Third Pole region, which encompasses the Tibetan Plateau, the Himalayas, the Hindu Kush, the Pamirs, and the Tien Shan Mountains, with melt-water from ice and snow feeding many of Asia’s large lakes and rivers. Transboundary implications demand attention going beyond country led climate action

Finally, we are pleased to highlight the remaining four papers in this issue:

The article by Eleanor Sharpston – “Do trees have rights?” – focuses on issues surrounding access to justice by NGOs in order to protect the environment and asks whether the time has come to add a crime of “ecocide” to be criminalized under the Rome Statute.
The examination of the challenge of plastic pollution by Surya Subedi and Amrisha Pandey outlines the need to develop a cooperative scheme that enables the international community to come together to tackle the issues associated with plastic and other forms of pollution.
The contribution by Oliver Ruppel and Cleo Dobers looks at the greening of trade law for global climate governance and the need for a bridge-building function between distinct legal and political fields, which have long been perceived irreconcilable, but which are by their very nature inherently connected.
The open access article by Greg Rose highlights that there is a serious lack of international law to criminalize environmental terrorism, and outlines a preliminary study of considerations in the formulation of a treaty to suppress environmental terrorism.