The Border Crossing

In June 1972 the UN Conference on the Human Environment will be held in Stockholm to consider international environmental problems. It is hoped that the meeting may lead to action in a field so far given more to discussion. It comes at a time of increasing recognition that many of these problems transcend national borders and can no longer be regarded as purely local matters. There also is a clearer realization that techniques employed against environmental ills within individual nations can be applied to similar problems that cross the borders of several nations.

There are abundant illustrations of regional problems of the upstream-downstream variety—where pollution created in one place adversely affects another place, and the downstream victim often has to pick up the tab for remedying the situation. The Rhine, for example, serves France and Germany as a sewer, but it is a part of the Netherlands' water supply. Acid rainfall over parts of Sweden and Norway has been attributed by some scientists to sulfur oxide emissions originating in industrial operations in Germany's Ruhr and England's Midlands. As a result, trout fishing in southern Norway is threatened, and there is a suspicion that the growth of trees is being impeded. The Environmental Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has been asked to investigate the problem, and management of the resulting project has been entrusted to Norway. The seaborne flow of pollutants from Italy to France along the Riviera is another instance of the upstream-downstream syndrome.

In other cases, because of the natural system involved, all parties become both emitters and receptors. This is true, for example, of the Baltic Sea and of Lake Erie. Countries around the Baltic are concerned, above all, about oil transportation and mercury pollution from pulp mills. The narrow link with the North Sea makes much of the Baltic practically an inland sea, and the results of a major oil spill could bring great harm to any or all of the countries on its shores.

Other cases involve despoliation rather than pollution in the conventional sense, but still present the upstream-downstream pattern of damage. Thus European conservationists are concerned about the effects that the Italian practice of netting will have on migratory bird populations. Large numbers of birds that winter in Africa and summer in the north of Europe are trapped each year as they migrate up the Italian peninsula.

Finally, there are the major environmental alterations that involve neither pollution nor despoliation. A case in point is the Aswan Dam. By cutting the flow of silt and organic debris in the Nile, the dam appears to have adversely affected the eastern Mediterranean sardine fishery (apart from other consequences that are purely domestic at this time).

Although regional and global problems have many similarities, it is useful to distinguish between them in order to emphasize that not every international environmental problem need be grist for the UN mill. It may, in fact, be helpful in seeking a solution to involve only the smallest possible group of nations—generally those directly interested. This is not to suggest that the distinction between the two classes will always be clear. Realistically, one must expect that some large-scale regional problems will be most conveniently dealt with as global issues, while the interests of a very few powerful nations may so dominate a global problem that its solution rests, at least initially, entirely with them. It has been suggested that global problems are best handled by the developed nations, not only because they are the principal polluters, but because it will be too much to expect the other nations of the world to take an interest in a problem that does not loom large at their stage of economic development.

Adapted from "International Environmental Problems—A Taxonomy," by Clifford S. Russell and Hans H. Landsberg, both of RFF, Science, June 25, 1971, by permission.