ABSTRACT
During the decades from Stockholm to Johannesburg, the international community had reacted to this compounding ecological stress in two major ways. The first had been an incremental accumulation of United Nations (UN)-based, subject-specific conferences and conventions to deal with the most visibly threatened individual media, pollutants and problems, punctuated by occasional 'summits' in 1972, 1992, 1997 and 2002 and intra-UN mechanisms such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) 1972 and the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) to provide coherence and central direction. The second way had been to build islands of intense institutionalized integrated cooperation at the restricted regional level, most notably in the European Union and, since 1994, in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), its companion North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC) and the latter's Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC).
