Research Statement

My research and writing focus thus far on global environmental change and global environmental governance, where the latter should be thought of in the broadest sense as the international community’s response to the former. My efforts are more in the area of synthesis and analysis than in the development and evaluation of new data.

I have sought in recent years to help synthesize available information on global-scale conditions and trends in environment and natural resources. There is some uncertainty, some debate, and much ignorance on basic dimensions of global change such as species and biodiversity loss, tropical deforestation, desertification, climate change, ozone layer depletion, overfishing, fresh water shortages, and environmental toxification. Correspondingly, I have addressed issues relating the underlying forces or drivers leading to these changes.

I have also sought to trace the rise of global environmental governance (GEG) and its principal aspect, international environmental law (IEL), over the past three decades, and to assess their effectiveness. My goals here have been to characterize the dimensions and key features of GEG and IEL as they have emerged, to understand the forces driving that emergence, to explain why the international responses by governments and others have taken the shape they have, to identify strengths and weaknesses of the resulting approaches, and to assess the results in light of environmental needs. These efforts have led me to revisit earlier work I began at the World Resources Institute on the requirements for and dimensions of a successful transition to sustainability and the adjustments needed to enhance the prospects for successes in GEG and IEL. These and other issues are addressed by me in Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) and Global Environmental Governance (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2006) (with Peter Haas).

Two specific aspects of these themes of particular interest have been (1) environment-globalization linkages, where I have edited a book, Worlds Apart: Globalization and the Environment, which grew out of a lecture series I organized at F&ES, and (2) the evolution of climate change policy and strategy from the emergence of the issue as a policy concern in 1979-1980 to the present.

One current concern is the examination of various pathways to sustainability that have been offered by academic and other writers (environmental economics; ecological economics; curbs on corporate power, consumerism, etc.) in order to tame or reign in the extraordinary froth made possible by modern-day capitalism.