Biodiversity and International Law

So far as we are aware, this planet, Earth, is the only place in the universe that can support human life. Humanity is therefore totally dependent on preserving the earth’s environment and its natural life support systems. Yet, day by day the effects of human activities are making the planet progressively less fit to live in. Resources which should be renewable are being exploited beyond the point of recovery. The destruction of specialised habitat, such as wetlands and tropical forests, involves the extinction of entire species whose potential value to man is completely unknown.

The extent to which all species may contribute to the maintenance of the ecosystems in which they are found, and the importance of species diversity to the resilience and productivity of ecosystems, is only now coming to be appreciated. From the 1960s onwards, the international community has gradually come to realise the nature and the scale of the threat to our environment and there has been a substantial increase in the number of international measures designed to protect it.

In 1980, a consortium of international organisations drafted a document embodying the philosophy and practical responses needed to confront these challenges, namely the World Conservation Strategy – or, as the author Robert Allen puts it in his explanatory summary, ‘How to Save the World’.

So that, in essence, is the aim of this option: to save the world – a modest enough ambition we are sure you would agree! More accurately, we aim to study certain of the measures adopted by the international community in order to protect the world’s biological diversity for its own sake and for the sake of ourselves and of future generations, to examine their achievements and shortcomings and to establish an agenda for the future.