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Environment: Pollution

Synthetic chemicals known as endocrine disruptors are an excellent example of emerging contaminants where the threats and consequences for water quality, human health, and the environment are still not fully understood. Endocrine disruptors – chemicals that can interfere with hormone action – have been identified among chemicals used in agriculture, industry, and households, and for personal care, including pesticides, disinfectants, plastic additives, and pharmaceuticals like birth control pills. Many of these endocrine-disruptors mimic or block other hormones in the body, disrupting the development of the endocrine system and the organs that respond to endocrine signals in organisms indirectly exposed during. | 8 Environment Pollution Peter M. Haas the twenty-first century suggests renowned biologist E. O. Wilson will be the age of the environment.1 Despite the convenience of millennial accounting this age started earlier with the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment UNCHE when the international community first became aware of the widespread impact of human behavior on the natural environment. Before then national leaders were by and large unfamiliar with environmental issues scientific understanding was rudimentary and there were few national or international institutions available for promoting environmental protection. Over the last thirty years however the environment has become firmly established on the international diplomatic agenda and through regime formation binding rules have been developed for most human activities affecting environmental quality. Almost all areas of human economic activity are now subject to at least one international environmental accord and most countries are bound by a number of international environmental commitments. One feature of international environmental governance is particularly striking national governments have become increasingly aware of the complexity of the threats to the world s ecosystems and of the need for more comprehensive and collective responses. Accordingly the substance of regional and international legal arrangements on the environment has begun to reflect this awareness. Environmental governance the ever-expanding network of legal obligations and formal institutions influencing states environmental policies has evolved principally through the development of better scientific understanding about the behavior of the physical environment combined with a growing appreciation of the role that international institutions can play. These regulations and institutions have contributed to a structural change in the world economy and to the development of markets for clean technology. UNCHE provides the benchmark .