Global Environmental Agreements and Their Effectiveness

This diploma thesis deals with global environmental agreements and their effectiveness. Its aim is to disclose the causes of success of some agreements and, on the contrary, the motives of failure of other agreements. In the theoretical part, the specialities of the environmental problems are illustrated, followed by the introduction to the international environmental law and agreements. In the practical part, two well-known international agreements concerned with atmosphere are compared. They deal with similar problem, but they achieved very different results. The objective of step-by-step comparison of diverse aspects of both agreements is to discover what factors caused the great success of the Montreal Protocol in protecting the ozone layer and why the similarly conceived Kyoto Protocol failed in the combat against climate change. Last chapter concludes this comparison and defines key characteristics which are essential for the effectiveness of the global environmental agreements