ABSTRACT
The nature and context of environmental affairs changed in the late 1990s. The environmental problems worrying the world were bigger and more pervasive than those that had been top of the priority list at Stockholm in 1972. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which brought together most of the world’s top climatologists, concluded that the human augmentation of ‘greenhouse gas’ concentrations in the atmosphere was indeed altering world climate. Under the Framework Convention on Climate Change, which entered into force soon after Rio, governments began to take action to cut back emissions from the developed world. Action to eliminate the use of chlorofluorocarbons, the principal destroyers of stratospheric ozone, was taken under the Montreal Protocol to the Convention on the Protection of the Ozone Layer (and its London Amendment). The entry into force of the Convention on Biological Diversity brought further demands for action by governments.
