Introduction

In 2000 the US National Intelligence Council boldly predicted that by 2015 “[o]ther agreements, such as the Convention on Biodiversity, will fall short in meeting their objectives”. ¹ Discounting that the US is apt to belittle agreements it has refused to join (and even worked to undermine during the negotiations), predictions about the success of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) are indeed largely pessimistic. Reports continually suggest that the race to protect ecosystems is being lost, while new threats keep appearing. Existing agreements, which reflect the very complexity of the environment-politics nexus, are considered too unwieldy and ineffectual even to begin to stabilize a dramatic trend that seems to go irrevocably downwards.