A Disscussion On The Clinton’s Environmental Diplomacy

Since the 20 th century,along with the continuous development of industrialization,the constant environmental pollution incidents have sounded the alarm for all countries.Representatives of these included the photochemical smog pollution in Los Angeles in 1943 and the Minamata disease in Kumamoto,Japan in1956,which shocked the world.The United States government has gradually realized the global nature of environmental issue in the practice of environmental protection and has thus carried out environmental diplomacy.U.S.environmental diplomacy officially originated in the 1970 s.The Nixon administration set up a number of environmental protection agencies,actively participated in the International Environmental Conference,took the lead in signing environmental treaties and took the initiative to carry out international environmental cooperation,all of these effectively promoting the rise of U.S.environmental diplomacy.The climax of environmental diplomacy was during the Clinton administration.Bill Clinton himself is a determined environmentalist.During his tenure,he attached great importance to the issue of environmental diplomacy and issued the first environmental diplomacy report in the history of the United States,raising the status of environmental diplomacy in U.S.diplomacy.Environmental diplomacy was also actively conducted in his terms of office,and Asia,Africa and Latin America were the major recipient regions.Clinton’s most outstanding achievements in environmental diplomacy were reducing greenhouse gas emissions and coping with global warming.He successively sent a U.S.delegation to the first,second and third conferences of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and signed important international documents such as the Berlin mandate,the Geneva Declaration and the Kyoto Protocol.Combining a batch of newly published documents,this paperexamines Clinton’s environmental diplomacy during his term of office,reveals the achievements and shortcomings of Clinton’s environment diplomacy and analyzes the underlying causes of such deficiencies.Then I try to evaluate the Clinton administration’s environmental diplomacy objectively.This paper includes following parts.The introduction describes the main contents of the paper,the significance of the research,the historical sources and the research situation at home and abroad.The first part includes the historical development of U.S.environmental diplomacy,which can be divided into two phases,first is the rise period in the 1970 s and second is the stagnation of 1980 s.The second part is the main part of this paper,which introduced the ideology and some important practices of the Clinton administration.Citing the three conferences of the parties as the main thread,this part elaborates on the position held by the Clinton administration during the three conferences of the parties.The third part is conclusion,which tries to analyze and evaluate the Clinton administration’s environmental diplomacy objectively.