The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, referred to as the Plant Treaty, was approved on 3 November 2001 by Members of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), headquartered in Rome, Italy. The FAO is an agency of the United Nations, headquartered in New York City, New York. The Plant Treaty established international standards for the conservation and e...

We introduce uncertainty and risk aversion to the study of international environmental agreements. We consider a simple model with identical agents and linear payoffs. We show that a stable treaty with positive action always exists. While uncertainty lowers the action of signatories, we find that it may increase participation. In addition, uncertainty may generate multiple equilibria. A treaty ...

The literature on international environmental agreements has recognized the role transfers play in encouraging participation in international environmental agreements (IEAs), but the few results achieved so far are overly specific and do not exploit the full potential of transfers for successful treaty-making. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a framework that enables us to study the role of...

Dr. Victor Bragin has been involved in the development of a fissile material cut-off treaty since 1994, first as Safeguards Analyst at the International Atomic Energy Agency, and since January 1996 as Safeguards Adviser at the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office (ASNO). Mr. John Carlson is Director-General of ASNO, and is a statutory officer responsible directly to the Australian...

The insecticide DDT has been an effective and affordable means of malaria control in many countries, but pressure for its use to be banned is mounting. Here, Chris Curtis and Jo Lines take a critical look at evidence that links house spraying by DDT with harm to the environment and human health, and stress the need for resources for alternatives to DDT to be made available to countries that wou...

3. Being this recent harm reduction was not foreseen by any of the international drug control treaties. Therefore, there is no treaty-based definition for it and there are no specific treaty provisions that may be applied to the concept as such, at least not in general terms. A useful, albeit non-binding definition has been outlined by UNDCP in its publication Demand Reduction – A glossary of T...

The United Nations adopted an historic international Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) in April 2013. A 1997 meeting of Nobel Peace Prize laureates who called for an International Code of Conduct to address the 'destructive effects of the unregulated arms trade' initiated discussions that led to the Treaty. Public health institutions, including the World Health Organization and the International Committe...

Among the states that possess nuclear weapons, the United Kingdom is now regarded as one of the least problematic. Long established and recognized as a nuclear weapon state (NWS) under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), it has a stable democracy, competent administrative system, disciplined military forces, and a cooperative approach to international security. It is a...