To See or Forsee: Environment Regulation or Economic Interest

Abstract

We are living in an Anthropocene era where there is a rising conflict between nature and humankind. With the advent of globalization, the world has become one trading platform where manufacturing deployment trade-off is adopted at the expense of the environment with an objective of profit maximization. However, this conflict can be traced back to the 18^th century popularly known as the industrial era. In the Initial stage (1900-1950), there were not many conventions or declarations dealing with environment protection, except for few, one such is a treaty signed between US and Great Britain in 1911 to curb ecological crisis in North Pacific Fur Seal population. Later at the formative stage (1951-1972) many authors highlighted the plight of environment in their books like “Silent Spring”. Further, the Stockholm Declaration of 1972 introduced the right to healthy environment, precautionary principle, and principle of no harm. This revolutionary step drew the attention of the world leaders towards the development of environmental jurisprudence resulting in futuristic developments like Kyoto Protocol, Rio+20 and Paris Agreement with the aim to mitigate and adapt to the changing climate. However, there is no specific convention or declaration dealing with the international trade and environment law, which draws our attention to identify the foremost issue of how trade and environment are corelated, what are the key mechanisms dealing with the said conflict and lastly how sustainable entrepreneurship can be one of the contributory factors to resolve the issue of climate change with the help of trade.