ad made it necessary to envisage the problem of international protection of the environment, the first approach of most international lawyers was to consider the problem as a conflict between two sovereignties caused by transfrontier pollution. Although, in order to face the more and more numerous environmental problems, multilateral conventions were multiplied in the 1970s and 1980s, even now there is a general trend among international lawyers to limit their approach to a rather archaic bilateral one. The evolution and broadening of the minds in this field should certainly be one of the consequences of global change.
As far as international legislation is concerned, the most obvious consequence of global change is the rapidly growing number of multilateral treaties, often covering fields and problems that either did not exist or have not formerly been discovered.
The complexity of such problems leads to a second consequence, which was hardly understood at the beginning. At a certain stage of the law-making process, problem areas cannot be treated separately. The first approaches to environmental protection were essentially sectorial: separate norms and rules were adopted for continental waters, the sea, atmospheric pollution, and wildlife conservation. An important step forward was the terminology used in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea,4 which speaks of the protection and preservation of the marine environment. Apparently, this means more than only the water of the sea. Moreover, Article 195 of the Convention imposes upon states the duty "not to transfer, directly or indirectly, damage or hazards from one area to another or transform one type of pollution into another."5 Thus the interconnection between different components of the environment has been recognized.
The following stage in this evolution was the understanding that, although sectorial approaches to environmental problems- handling separately water pollution,6 sea pollution,7 air pollution,8 and wildlife conservation9 - are still important, more attention should be paid to the substances that create pollution and that may be found in all the different areas. The latest approach to the protection of the biosphere consists thus in the international control of potentially harmful substances at the different stages of their existence: production, transport, trade, use, and elimination of chemicals and of radioactive material.10
This evolution already implies a strong tendency toward globalization: the international transportation of toxic or dangerous chemical substances or waste, the "exportation" of harmful activities to other mainly developing -countries cannot be controlled without worldwide cooperation. The situation is the same in other fields, such as the trade of drugs or the struggle against certain diseases such as AIDS. In addition, during the last decade we became aware of the existence of problems that cannot be approached without planetary cooperation and thus legislation: for example, the depletion of the ozone layer, the modification of the global climate, and the threats against the world's genetic heritage. Different factors inherent in such problems need new approaches in the legal techniques used by the international community for law-making.
One of the most striking features of the international legislation since 1945 is the enormous importance of "soft-law" instruments, for example, the texts that were adopted by states without being legally binding. Of course, the first and most evident cause for this is the expansion of the number of international bodies that have not been endowed with the power to adopt mandatory texts, but only recommendations. As a consequence, this is the only way to address their member states. However, one should not forget that originally such resolutions could only correspond to the current work and management of the concerned international body, while in reality resolutions of certain international organs, such as the UN General Assembly, play an important role in the international legislative process. T