Despite numerous international agreements on every conceivable aspect of the global environment, eco problems are getting worse not better. According to Prof Larry Susskind - a distinguished expert on disputes between governments over the environment - this is because the way international treaties are put together is fundamentally flawed.
"Almost none of the treaties, some of which have been in effect for decades have achieved what they were set up to achieve," said Susskind, who runs the MIT Harvard Public Disputes Programme.
The alphabet soup of big international treaties like those on climate (UNFCC), endangered species (http://www.cites.org/), and wetlands (RAMSAR), have all promised much, but delivered little.
He argued in a lecture to the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting in Boston on Saturday that there is a fundamental problem in the way these agreements are set up. There are no penalties, for example, for signing a treaty but not ratifying it, or for ratifying it but not complying.
In a Science Extra podcast interview he told me how the process of treaty-making and treaty enforcement could be modified to make environmental agreements more effective.
