Environmental Diplomacy LESLEY MASTERS University of Johannesburg, South Africa THE ENVIRONMENT AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Environmental concerns have become increasingly visible on the international agenda, from desertification to whaling. e negative impact of environmental degradation and the fallout from the mismanagement of the global commons has seen states under pressure to cooperate in managing the world’s finite environmen- tal resources. Environmental studies in the past may have been associated with the “soſt sciences,” but the impact of environmen- tal degradation is increasingly “hard” as it plays out across numerous fields such as economics, health, transport, agriculture, the built environment, and peace and security. is has implications for domestic politics as governments struggle to manage increased drought or flooding and the subsequent stresses on food and water security, health and livelihoods. It also has international impacts such as large-scale migration as a result of climate change. Predictions are that migration as a result of environmental degra- dation may outstrip migration as a result of political conflict. Reports by researchers even go as far as warning that by 2050 there could be 200 million climate migrants, although this number is contested (Barnes 2013). With growing attention given to the nat- ural environment, environmental diplomacy has only more recently gained traction in the diplomacy discourse despite the long history e Encyclopedia of Diplomacy. Edited by Gordon Martel. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118885154.dipl0092 of cross-border agreements on environmental resources. ere are records of multilateral environmental agreements that date back as far as 1857 covering the management of the flow of water from Lake Constance, situated between Austria, Germany, and Switzerland; and bilateral agreements that date from 1351 in the example of the treaty between England and Castile (France) in managing marine fisheries. According to the Register of Inter- national Treaties and Other Agreements in the Field of the Environment, released by the UNEP (2005), there are 272 international environmental agreements listed between 1920 and 2005, covering areas as diverse as climate, the atmosphere, water, fauna, flora, chemicals, sensitive biosystems, and outer space. While negotiations between states may be successful in reaching an agreement on shared resources, the challenge is that they may be a political outcome rather than environmental. For example in the case of the whaling conventions – the Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (1931), the International Agreement for the Regulation of Whaling (1937), and the International Convention for the Regulation of Whal- ing (1946) – it is argued that not “only did they fail to reverse the decline of the whale populations, they may have actually have made matters worse by lending the slaughter an aura of legitimacy and respectability” (Cioc 2009: 335). Here country and business interests shaped the outcomes of these nego- tiations to the detriment of the protection of the whale species. Parties to a negotiation may even go as far as using the cover of diplo- matic engagement to delay, or even undo, an outcome that may restrict their own interests in the management of natural resources.