These notes cover the Class 12 Political Science chapter Environment and Natural Resources from Contemporary World Politics. The chapter looks at how environmental concerns entered global politics, what the global commons and common property resources are, how the North and the South argue over who should fix the damage, and why the rights of indigenous peoples are tied to land and resources. For more board revision material, see our wider study notes library.
Environmental Concerns in Global Politics
What are the current environmental concerns?
Until recently, global politics was understood in a limited way: wars and treaties, the rise and fall of state authority, the dealings between governments in the international arena, and the role of intergovernmental organisations. Over time the idea of world politics widened to include issues such as poverty and disease. That was not a hard step to take, because we already accept that governments are responsible for such matters, so they belong to international politics.
How do these concerns fit into contemporary world politics?
The pressure on the planet is now impossible to ignore. Cultivable land is barely expanding, while a large share of existing farmland is losing its fertility. Grasslands and fisheries have been overgrazed and overused. Water bodies have been badly depleted and polluted, which puts a serious limit on food production.
According to the United Nations Development Programme's 2006 Human Development Report, 1.2 billion people in poor countries lacked access to safe drinking water and 2.6 billion lacked access to sanitation, which led to the death of almost three million children each year. Natural forests, which help stabilise the climate, regulate water supplies and house most of the world's land species, are being degraded, and people are being displaced. The loss of biodiversity continues as habitats in species-rich places are destroyed.
Steady declines in the total ozone in the Earth's stratosphere, often called the ozone hole, pose a serious threat to ecosystems and to human health. Coastal pollution is also rising worldwide. The open sea remains relatively clean, but coastal waters are becoming steadily more contaminated, mainly because of activities on land. If this is left unchecked, the intense human settlement of coastal zones will keep lowering the quality of the marine environment.
Once governments try to halt this damage, the issues become political, because most of them are too big and too complex for any single government to solve on its own. In a broad sense, environmental and natural resource issues raise deeply political questions:
- Who is responsible for environmental degradation?
- Who bears the cost, and who is finally accountable for corrective action?
- Who gets to use how much of the Earth's natural resources?
All of these questions come back to who holds the most power, which is exactly why they are political. Although environmental problems have a long history, from the 1960s onward the environmental effects of economic growth took on an increasingly political dimension.
The Earth Summit
In 1972, the Club of Rome, a global think tank, published a book titled Limits to Growth, which warned that Earth's resources could be depleted in the face of a fast-rising global population. Worldwide bodies such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) began holding international conferences and funding detailed studies to build a more coordinated response. From then on, the environment rose to prominence as a major issue in world politics.
This growing importance was firmly established at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in June 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which is also known as the Earth Summit. The conference drew 170 states, thousands of non-governmental organisations and many international businesses. Five years earlier, the 1987 Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, had warned that the old patterns of economic growth were not sustainable in the long run, especially given the South's demand for more industrial development.
At the Rio Summit it was clear that the wealthy, established countries of the First World, together called the global North, had a different agenda from the poorer, developing countries of the Third World, together called the global South. The Northern states were mainly worried about ozone depletion and global warming, while the Southern states focused on the link between economic development and environmental management.
The Rio Summit produced treaties on climate change, biodiversity and forestry, and recommended a set of development principles known as Agenda 21. It agreed on the need to balance economic growth with care for the environment, a path often called sustainable development. However, it left major disagreements unresolved, above all the question of how this balance was to be achieved. Some critics argued that Agenda 21 leaned towards economic growth rather than ecological protection.
Protection of the Global Commons
What are the global commons?
The word commons refers to resources owned by a community rather than by private individuals. In the same way, some areas of the world lie outside the sovereign control of any single country and so need to be governed by the international community. These areas are called the global commons, or humanitas res communis. Examples include the Earth's atmosphere, Antarctica, the ocean floor and outer space.
Cooperation over the global commons is difficult. Even so, some ground-breaking agreements have been drafted, such as the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, the 1987 Montreal Protocol and the 1991 Antarctic Environmental Protocol. The hardest part is reaching agreement on a shared agenda when the scientific evidence and the time frames are uncertain. The discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole in the mid-1980s showed both the promise and the danger of dealing with global environmental problems. The history of outer space as a global commons shows the same thing: how these domains are managed makes a real difference, and the benefits of exploiting them are far from equally shared between present and future generations.
Common but differentiated responsibilities
The North and the South approach these problems differently. The affluent countries of the North want to tackle the environment as it stands now and want everyone to share equally in the responsibility for protecting it. The developing countries of the South argue that the industrial growth of the wealthy countries is to blame for most of the world's environmental damage. If those countries caused the greater harm, they should carry a larger share of the burden of undoing it today. The South also points out that developing countries are still industrialising and should not face the same restrictions as developed ones.
For this reason, the special needs of developing nations must be taken into account when international environmental laws are created, applied and interpreted. This idea of shared but differentiated responsibilities was backed in the Rio Declaration at the 1992 Earth Summit.
States shall work together in the spirit of global partnership to conserve, protect and restore the health and integrity of the Earth's ecosystem. Given the different contributions to global environmental degradation, states have common but differentiated responsibilities.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) of 1992 says the same: parties should act on an equitable basis and in line with their common but differentiated responsibilities and their different capabilities. The Convention accepted that the industrialised countries were responsible for the largest share of past and present greenhouse gas emissions, and that the per capita emissions of developing countries were still low. On this basis, the Kyoto Protocol's targets were not applied to China, India and other emerging countries.
What is the Kyoto Protocol?
The Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement that sets targets for developed countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and hydrofluorocarbons are believed to be largely responsible for global warming, the rise in global temperature that threatens life on Earth. Based on the principles of the UNFCCC, the protocol was adopted in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan.
Common Property Resources
Common property is property that belongs to a group. The basic rule is that members of the group hold both rights and duties over how a given resource is used, how much it is used and how it is looked after. Many Indian village communities, for example, have worked out the rights and responsibilities of their members over centuries of practice and shared understanding.
Because of a mix of factors such as privatisation, more intensive farming, population growth and the decline of ecosystems, common property has shrunk in size, quality and availability in many parts of the world. A good example of a common property regime is the way sacred groves on state-owned forest land are managed. Village communities along South India's forest belt have traditionally cared for these sacred groves.
India's Position on Environmental Issues
The Kyoto Protocol and India
India signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol in August 2002. India, China and other developing countries were exempt from its emission targets, because their contribution to greenhouse gas emissions during the period of industrialisation, which is seen as the cause of today's global warming, was small. Critics of the protocol argued that India and China would in time become major emitters themselves.
At the G-8 meeting in June 2005, India pointed out that the per capita emission rates of developing countries are only a fraction of those in the developed world. India argued that the developed countries, which have built up emissions over a long period, bear the main responsibility for cutting them, on the principle of common but differentiated responsibility.
India's negotiating stance rests heavily on the UNFCCC's principle of historical responsibility. This accepts that developed countries are responsible for most past and present greenhouse gas emissions, while stressing that the first and overriding priorities of developing countries are economic and social development. India is therefore wary of recent UNFCCC discussions about asking rapidly industrialising countries such as Brazil, China and India to cut emissions, which India believes goes against the spirit of the Convention. It also seems unfair to restrict India when its per capita carbon emissions are expected to grow to less than half of the projected global average of 3.8 tonnes in 2030.
India's emissions are expected to rise from 0.9 tonnes per capita in 2000 to 1.6 tonnes per capita in 2030. Even so, the Indian government is already contributing to global efforts through several programmes. India's National Auto-fuel Policy requires cleaner fuels for vehicles. The Energy Conservation Act of 2001 sets out ways to improve energy efficiency, and the Electricity Act of 2003 encourages the use of renewable energy. In recent years India has also imported natural gas and promoted clean coal technologies. The government planned a National Mission on Biodiesel, and India runs one of the largest renewable energy programmes in the world.
In 1997, India reviewed how the Rio Earth Summit agreements were being carried out. A key finding was that little real progress had been made in transferring new financial resources and environmentally sound technology to developing countries on fair terms. India believes that developed countries must move quickly to provide this finance and clean technology so that developing countries can meet their UNFCCC commitments. India also believes that SAARC countries should take a united stand on major global environmental issues so that the region's voice is heard more clearly.
Environmental Movements: One or Many?
So far we have looked at how governments have responded to the threat of environmental degradation. But some of the most important responses have come not from governments but from groups of environmentally aware volunteers around the world. A few work on a global scale, while most work locally. Environmental movements are among the most active, varied and powerful social movements today. Within them, new forms of political action appear or are reinvented, and they generate fresh ideas about how we should live, both as individuals and together.
These movements are marked by their diversity. Forest movements in the global South, such as those in Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Malaysia, Indonesia, continental Africa and India, are under great stress, because forest clearance in the developing world continues at an alarming rate despite three decades of activism. The minerals industry is one of the most powerful industries on the planet, and as economies in the South opened up to multinational corporations through economic liberalisation, its digging, use of chemicals, pollution of water and land, clearing of native vegetation and displacement of communities have all been criticised and resisted. In the Philippines, for example, a wide network of groups campaigned against the Western Mining Corporation, an Australian multinational.
Another strand is the movement against mega-dams. Almost every country building a mega-dam faces opposition from environmental groups, and anti-dam movements are increasingly becoming pro-river movements that call for fairer and more sustainable management of rivers and valleys. The first anti-dam movement in the North was the campaign to save the Franklin River and its forests in Australia in the early 1980s. From Turkey to Thailand, South Africa, Indonesia and China, mega-dam construction is rising. Some of the world's most powerful anti-dam and pro-river movements began in India, the best known being the Narmada Bachao Andolan. It is worth noting that in India's anti-dam and other environmental movements, nonviolence has been the most common theme.
Resource Geopolitics
Resource geopolitics is about who gets what natural resource, when, where and how. Resources have long been a major means and motive for European powers to expand across the globe, and they have also been a focus of rivalry between states. Western thinking about resources has been shaped by trade, war and power, with an emphasis on overseas supplies and sea routes. In the 17th century, the supply of naval timber became a top priority for the major European powers, because sea power itself depended on access to timber. The importance of a steady supply of strategic resources, especially oil, was firmly established during both World Wars.
Throughout the Cold War, the industrialised countries of the North used many strategies to secure a constant flow of resources. They stationed armed forces near extraction sites and along transport corridors, stockpiled strategic resources, tried to prop up friendly governments in producing countries, and helped multinational corporations gain favourable agreements. Western strategy remained focused on access to supplies that the Soviet Union might threaten, with control of oil and of strategic minerals in Southern and Central Africa a major concern. After the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union broke up, the security of supply for various minerals, especially radioactive materials, stayed a concern for governments and businesses.
Oil, however, remains the single most important resource in global strategy. For most of the twentieth century it was a readily available and indispensable source of energy for the world economy. Because of the enormous wealth linked to oil, political conflicts over its control are common, and the history of petroleum is also a history of war and struggle. This is clearest in West and Central Asia. Around 30 per cent of the world's oil is produced in West Asia, especially the Gulf region, which holds roughly 64 per cent of known global reserves, making it the only region able to meet any large rise in demand. Saudi Arabia is the world's largest producer, and Iraq is second in known reserves, with much of its territory still unexplored. The main petroleum-consuming countries, the United States, Europe, Japan and, increasingly, India and China, lie far from this region.
Water is another critical resource for global politics. Regional differences and the growing scarcity of fresh water in some parts of the world mean that disputes over shared water could become a major source of conflict in the twenty-first century. Some commentators have coined the term water wars to describe the risk of violent conflict over this life-sustaining resource. Countries that share a river can disagree over many things. A common dispute is between a downstream, or lower riparian, state and an upstream, or upper riparian, state over pollution, heavy irrigation or dam building by the upstream state, which can reduce or spoil the water reaching the downstream state. States have even used force to protect or seize freshwater resources, as in the conflict between Israel, Syria and Jordan in the 1950s and 1960s over diverting the Jordan and Yarmuk rivers, and in later tensions between Turkey, Syria and Iraq over dams on the Euphrates.
Indigenous Peoples and Their Rights
The issue of indigenous peoples brings environmental, resource and political concerns together. According to the United Nations, indigenous populations are the descendants of peoples who lived in a country's present territory at the time when people of a different culture or ethnic origin arrived from elsewhere and overcame them. Indigenous peoples today follow their own social, economic and cultural customs more than the institutions of the country they have become part of.
The world's estimated 30 million indigenous people share many interests. They live in Central and South America, Africa, India, where they are called Tribals, and Southeast Asia, and the Polynesian, Melanesian and Micronesian peoples have inhabited many island states in the Oceania region, including Australia and New Zealand, for thousands of years. Like other social movements, indigenous people speak about their struggles, agendas and rights, and they ask to be admitted to the world community as equals. They use the phrase since time immemorial to describe their long occupation of their lands. Their worldviews about land, and about the web of life it supports, are strikingly similar wherever they live. The clearest threat to their survival is the loss of land, which is also the loss of an economic base. This raises a hard question: is it possible to have political autonomy without control over the means of physical survival?
In India, the Scheduled Tribes, who make up nearly 8 per cent of the population, are commonly described as indigenous people. Apart from a few small groups of hunters and gatherers, most of India's indigenous peoples rely on cultivating land, and for centuries they had free access to as much land as they could farm. Their areas came under outside pressure only after British colonial rule was established. Despite constitutional protection in political representation, they have not shared in the benefits of the country's development. In fact they have paid a high price for it, as they form the single largest group of people displaced by development projects since independence.
For a long time, the rights of indigenous peoples were ignored in both domestic and international politics. Growing contact among indigenous leaders around the world in the 1970s created a shared sense of concern and experience. In 1975 the World Council of Indigenous Peoples was set up, and it became the first of 11 indigenous non-governmental organisations to be granted consultative status at the United Nations.
Why it still matters
This chapter can feel like history, but its central argument is the exact fault line at climate talks happening right now. The Kyoto Protocol you just read about has been succeeded by the 2015 Paris Agreement, under which every country, not only the rich ones, sets its own targets. The old question the chapter keeps asking, who caused the damage and who should pay to fix it, is still the hardest question in the room. That principle even has the same name today: common but differentiated responsibilities.
India's stance has moved on too. At the COP26 summit in Glasgow in 2021, India pledged to reach net zero emissions by 2070, to meet half of its energy needs from non-fossil sources and to build 500 GW of non-fossil power capacity by 2030. India still argues, exactly as the chapter describes, that its per capita emissions are low and that richer countries must lead and must provide finance and clean technology.
The North versus South money fight is very much alive. At COP29 in Baku in November 2024, developed countries agreed to lead in mobilising at least 300 billion US dollars a year for developing countries by 2035, tripling the earlier 100 billion dollar target. Many developing countries called the figure far too small, echoing the same complaint the global South raised back at Rio in 1992. Then, in November 2025, COP30 was held in Belem in Brazil, right at the edge of the Amazon rainforest, which put the very tension between forests, development and the global commons that started at the Earth Summit back at the centre of world attention.
In other words, the debate is not settled, it is ongoing, and you are living through it. If you want to see how climate, resources and geopolitics connect across subjects, explore the Learnacy Hub, and you can revise related chapters in our study notes.
Sources
- UNFCCC, COP29 agrees to triple finance to developing countries (300 billion US dollars a year by 2035), November 2024
- United Nations, COP30, Belem, Brazil, November 2025
- Press Information Bureau, Government of India, National Statement by the Prime Minister at COP26, Glasgow (India net zero by 2070), 2021
Key takeaways
- Environmental concerns expanded the scope of global politics beyond traditional issues like wars and treaties.
- Environmental degradation includes loss of cultivable land fertility, overuse of grasslands and fisheries, and depletion of water bodies.
- The Earth Summit (1992) marked a turning point by establishing environmental issues as a major agenda in world politics.
- The global North and South have differing priorities: the North focuses on ozone depletion and global warming, while the South emphasizes sustainable development and industrial growth.
- Environmental issues are inherently political, raising questions about responsibility, accountability, and resource distribution among nations.
Test yourself
What was the significance of the Earth Summit held in 1992?
The Earth Summit established environmental issues as a major agenda in world politics and drew global participation, including states, NGOs, and businesses.
How do the priorities of the global North and South differ regarding environmental issues?
The global North prioritizes ozone depletion and global warming, while the global South focuses on sustainable development and linking environmental concerns to industrial growth.
Why are environmental issues considered political?
Environmental issues are political because they raise questions about responsibility, accountability, and resource distribution, which are tied to power dynamics among nations.
What are some examples of environmental degradation mentioned in the note?
Examples include loss of cultivable land fertility, overuse of grasslands and fisheries, depletion of water bodies, and degradation of natural forests.
What role did the Brundtland Report (1987) play in shaping environmental discourse?
The Brundtland Report warned that old patterns of economic growth were unsustainable, particularly given the South's demand for industrial development, influencing the agenda for the Earth Summit.
