Environmental law is not just a state and federal matter - there are also many agreements among countries regulating treatment of the environment, preservation of biodiversity, and others. These treaties are usually considered to be legally binding against the countries who choose to adopt and ratify them.
Some of the main international treaties/ agreements regarding environmental law are listed below:
1972 UN Convention on the Human Environment: This was the first worldwide conference that recognized environmental protection as being an important international issue. It also created the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), which now is considered to be the global authority on setting the agenda for environmental issues.
1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED): This conference focused heavily on how human activity is affecting and degrading the state of the environment. It set goals for countries to achieve more sustainable development practices, set out in Agenda 21.
1997 Kyoto Protocol: This treaty was the first one was concrete goals for countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It set binding emission reduction targets for 37 industrialized countries that added up to a 5% overall decrease in global greenhouse gas emissions.
2002 World Earth Summit: This summit focused heavily on sustainable development and how the world could manage allocation and conservation of natural resources while the population and demand for food and water grows.
2015 Paris Agreement: The goal of this treaty is to limit overall global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Each of the 196 countries who are a part of the agreement are required to set their own goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions every five years. This is a very prominent treaty right now, as it is the most recent, and the U.S. recently re-joined it under the Biden administration.
The original text of the treaties/ conference reports are all linked above.
There are, of course, many other international environmental treaties. Some helpful resources for finding others are linked below:
ECOLEX allows you to search for any and all treaties specifically concerning environmental law.
The UN Treaty Collection allows you to view the full text of treaties (including those that the U.S. is not a party to) from 1783 to the present.
HeinOnline's U.S. Treaties and Agreements Library is also a good resource for finding treaties that the U.S. is a party to.
The UNFCCC eHandbook is a good starting point for researching international environmental law with regards to the UN, as it provides a good description of the "big picture" of the UNFCCC's objectives and work.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also has a IPCC Library webpage with assessment reports, special reports, technical papers, and methodology reports. This could be very helpful once you narrow down a research topic in international environmental law.
Brooklynn Law School has also created a very thorough and comprehensive research guide, with many helpful resources, dedicated mostly to the area of international environmental law. This guide can be found here.
As always when researching a topic of international nature, it is helpful to look at USD Law's International Law guide, which provides more information on the technicalities of writing about international law, like abbreviations and Bluebook citations.
