Existing environmental law is frequently criticized for its ineffectiveness. For the last half of a century, major achievements in the field of environmental protection came down to the enhanced production of renewable energy, which was a great breakthrough even for the Western world. As for the rest, little progress has been made. Every government is responsible for the efficiency of their domestic environmental laws, but all of them should take care of the global environment as well. Experts admit that international law is a weak point due to the complexity of international relations.
Since the UN Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972, a great number of international agreements were signed none of which has done a considerable progress. Numerous treaties exhausted parliaments that could not see where they shall concentrate their efforts and financial resources. The United Nations alone have issued plenty of agreements such as the Convention on the Law of Sea, the Convention to Combat Desertification, or the Framework Convention on the Climate Change that look rather like declarative publications than legal binding documents.
The UN Conference on Environment and Development was another large environmental event held in Rio in 1992. This global summit was attended by 172 governments’ representatives and countless NGOs; it resulted in signing the Framework Convention on Climate Change, which paved the way to Kyoto Protocol. The latter acted for about 10 years since 2005 till 2015 when it was succeeded by Paris Agreement. The Protocol enabled trade in greenhouse gas permits that were supposed to cut down CO2 emissions.