Marine litter, generated mostly from land and sea-based sources and activities, has become a rapidly increasing complex problem facing to date the world’s oceans and seas.

The perspectives of sea-level rise and the potential legal issues that could ensue are not new for international law. Pioneering studies on the subject were published almost a quarter-century ago; however, their focus was on aspects concerning the law of the sea. In recent years, several publications on international law and climate change – monographs focusing on specific aspects such as forced migration, or collections addressing various other aspects involved – have contributed by introducing a range of legal concerns surrounding the perspective of sea-level rise.

The Arctic is a very special place. It is a region and it is an ocean. But “[t]here is no universally accepted definition of [the] Arctic Ocean” (Koivurova and Duyck, 2010 @ p.180). A working definition might include “the tree line (the northernmost boundary where trees grow) or the 10 °C isotherm (the southernmost location where the mean temperature of the warmest month of the year is below 10° C °).” Geographically, others conclude that the Arctic Circle begins at 66°, 33”latitude. For some international law purposes the Arctic is defined by memberships in institutions and governance mechanisms of the entities in the “Arctic region.”

Over the last thirty years, climate change and the depletion of the ozone layer have been widely believed to be the world's largest environmental challenges. Although both problems have many similarities, constituting the two principal threats to the global atmosphere, the effectiveness of the regimes that were established to address them varies significantly.

Loss & damage has only recently been accepted as a formal agenda item in the climate negotiations. It is now expected to be part of the post 2020 UN Climate Regime to be negotiated by 2015. After years of pressure from a growing number of developing countries, the question of what is to be done about the climate impacts that are not avoided through mitigation and adaptation efforts is thereby, for the first time, squarely before negotiators. This does not necessarily mean that the issue of liability for loss & damage will be resolved in the negotiations, but it means that Parties have agreed to start discussing what should be done about impacts that are not avoided through mitigation and adaptation.

Transboundary and global environmental threats require collection action. Concretely, this means developing forms of governance that apply common rules, norms and decision making procedures. Ideally, such governance should be resilient in the sense that it is able to persist over time and respond quickly and accurately to new threats. Yet the record of international environmental governance is mixed, at best. Some regimes have effectively addressed the problems at hand, many haven’t, and we still don’t know about the effectiveness of a surprisingly large number of regimes.