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A Rejoinder to ‘Holistic and Leadership Approaches to International Regulation: Confronting Nature Conservation and Developmental Challenges’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2014

Patricia L. Farnese
Patricia L. Farnese*
Affiliation:
University of Saskatchewan, College of Law, Saskatoon, SK (Canada). Email: Patricia.Farnese@usask.ca.
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Type
Rejoinder
Information
Transnational Environmental Law , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , October 2014 , pp. 321 - 322
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

In ‘Holistic and Leadership Approaches to International Regulation: Confronting Nature Conservation and Developmental Challenges’, Stuart Harrop applies my proposals regarding infectious zoonotic disease regulation to nature conservation more broadly.Footnote 1 Harrop correctly highlights that ‘health’ encompasses issues such as ‘food and water security, food safety, poverty and lack of access to fundamental natural resources’.Footnote 2 As an advocate of adopting a ‘One Health’ approachFootnote 3 to the task of resolving wicked problems,Footnote 4 I share this perspective. In fact, I began with the same broad perspective, but ultimately narrowed my focus in a pragmatic attempt to foster concrete action on environmental degradation.

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)Footnote 5 is widely regarded as the most appropriate candidate for global leadership on this issue. The fact that it has been unable to move to hard targets is puzzling. What explains the lack of political will in the face of mounting evidence, including lived experiences, of the dire consequences of human-induced environmental degradation? One possible explanation is that conservation advocates, and I among them, have placed unrealistic expectations on these multilateral environmental instruments to affect change because we have mistakenly assumed that the need to preserve resiliency in the natural environment is recognized as a foundational principle.Footnote 6 Whatever the cause of the chasm between aspiration and action, the consequence is that, in my view, it is reckless to continue to wait for soft targets to be translated into hard targets under the banner of environmental conservation.

Reframing environmental degradation as a health issue, however, shows promise for generating the necessary political will to produce concrete action. One needs only to look to the global response to H1N1 and SARS, as discussed in ‘The Prevention Imperative’,Footnote 7 to see real examples of states moving beyond political differences towards effective, coordinated action. While I endorse Harrop’s call for the emergence of effective global leadership in nature conservation under a health banner and support efforts to promote its development, I suspect that local and sector-based initiatives will deliver concrete action more quickly. Many examples suggest that health information can move to even the most remote places to influence and change individual human behaviour in a way that has not been replicated with environmental information.Footnote 8 The need to safeguard human health unquestionably has foundational characteristics. Health impacts are perceived as having individual consequences that demand immediate redress. Rightly or wrongly, environmental impacts do not elicit the same response. Whether at the global or local level, human health may ultimately prove to be the most effective leverage in addressing environmental degradation.

References

1 Harrop, S., ‘Holistic and Leadership Approaches to International Regulation: Confronting Nature Conservation and Developmental Challenges’ (2014) 3(2) Transnational Environmental Law, pp. 311–12.Google Scholar This commentary responds to Farnese, P., ‘The Prevention Imperative: International Health and Environmental Governance Responses to Emerging Zoonotic Diseases’ (2014) 3(2) Transnational Environmental Law, pp. 285–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Harrop, ibid., at p. 312.

3 One Health has been defined as ‘the collaborative efforts of multiple disciplines working together locally, nationally and globally to attain optimal health for people, animals and the environment together’: American Veterinary Medical Association, One Health: A New Professional Imperative – One Health Initiative Task Force Final Report (AVMA, 2008).

4 The term ‘wicked problem’ was first discussed in Rittel, H.W.J. & Webber, M.M., ‘Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning’ (1973) 4(2) Policy Sciences, pp. 155–69.Google Scholar At that time, the authors identified ten characteristics of wicked problems. More recently, Kolko distilled these characteristics into four reasons that make some problems so difficult to resolve (‘incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these problems with other problems’): J. Kolko, Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving (Austin Design Center, 2012), available online at: https://www.wickedproblems.com/1_wicked_problems.php.

5 Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), 4 Jun. 1993, in force 29 Dec. 1993, available at: http://www.cbd.int.

6 I use this term from the loosely Kantian perspective that there are some fundamental, moral concepts that structure human behaviour.

7 Farnese, n. 1 above, at pp. 293–4.

8 Albeit anecdotal, the following personal experiences are offered for consideration. In 1994, while living in a remote village in the Lampung province on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia, I assisted health workers as they shared information about the benefits of family planning and infant nutritional requirements with new mothers. In 2012, throughout the northern border regions of Cameroon, I observed a well-penetrated campaign linking hand washing with influenza control throughout this rural region. Similarly, I am confident that my children, despite my expertise in wetland protection, know much more about why they need to protect themselves from influenza than about the consequences of wetland degradation.