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Environmental law is a fairly new discipline of regulation and scholarship. At the international level, its evolution gained prominence following the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm, Sweden. At the time that the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) adopted the resolution to convene the Stockholm Conference, there was an assumption that the concept of the environment and the nature of environmental problems were universally understood. It, however, soon emerged that there was no consensus on what the terms meant. Developing countries argued that the conception of the term focused on challenges facing developed countries without any contextual linkages to, and appreciation of issues in the developing world. This forced the UN Secretary General to convene a special group of experts in 1971, before the Stockholm Conference, to discuss the problem and try and generate consensus. These events led to the development of the principle of sustainable development as the raison d’etre of legal and policy developments in the environmental law.
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