1.3 Nature and Scope of International Environmental Law

International environmental law (IEL) = the states' environmental relations' law: the treaties (the hundreds of MEAs), the customs, the soft-law principles (the declarations' line), and the dispute practice. The nature: a treaty-dominant field (the multilateral environmental agreements — the climate, biodiversity, desertification, ozone, heritage, wildlife-trade families); a soft-law-rich discipline (the principles' declarations — Stockholm 1972, Rio 1992 — as the normative engine); a science-dependent system (the IPCC-type bodies as the law's factual base); and a structurally challenged regime (the fragmentation — the regimes' silos; the enforcement's weakness — no environmental world court, the compliance committees' soft machinery; the North-South politics — the CBDR's architecture). The scope: the global commons (the climate, the biodiversity, the oceans, the ozone); the transboundary harms (the rivers, the airsheds); the shared resources (the migratory species, the heritage); and the domestic regimes' internationalisation (the standards' diffusion, the MEAs' national implementation).