Compliance Committees and Recent Multilateral Environmental Agreements: The Canadian Experience with Their Negotiation and Operation

SummaryIn order to enhance and encourage compliance with obligations in multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), states have agreed to the creation of compliance committees for all of the recent MEAs. Canada has been a strong supporter of the compliance committee experiment and an active participant in the negotiation and operation of numerous MEA compliance committees. This article does three things. First, it examines the international legal nature of the MEA compliance committees. Second, the key issues of the structure of the committees are explored. Finally, the article look at the development and operation of compliance committees pursuant to: the Montreal Protocol; the LRTAP Convention; the Espoo Convention; the Basel Convention; the Cartagena Protocol; the Rotterdam Convention; the Stockholm Convention; and the Protocol to the London Dumping Convention.

The critical load concept for emission abatement strategies in Europe: a review

Critical loads studies (critical load is ‘a quantitative estimate of an exposure to one or more pollutants below which no harmful effects may occur’) have been used as the basis for assessing European strategies for reduction of sulphur emissions within the United Nations (UN) Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP). It is expected that the critical loads method will be applied to future international agreements under the Convention. Mapping of European critical loads conducted for the LRTAP Convention have progressed notably in recent years.The concept of designing pollution control measures with the aim of protecting the most sensitive ecosystems, led to the creation of the Task Force on Mapping and Coordination Centre for Effects to implement these concepts on a European scale together with the corresponding National Focal Centres. The Russian National Focal Centre is used to illustrate how critical load data can be applied at the scale of a large country.The policy implications resulting from the methods described in this review would support the development of an acidification protocol. While this has been suggested in the past, it is only now that scientific knowledge has advanced sufficiently to consider the feasibility of such a policy.