The politics of acid rain in Europe

Acid rain has been a pivotal issue in the development of European environmental policies and programs. Appreciating the history of European responses to acid rain is also useful for understanding how the world has moved towards greater use of international environmental agreements to address transboundary pollution issues, such as stratospheric ozone depletion and global climate change. Indeed, the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE), the first truly global environmental meeting of the world's heads of state and government, was proposed in response to Sweden's concerns that acid rain originating in Great Britain and Germany (East and West) was responsible for the acidification and death of Scandinavian lakes. At the time of the UNCHE, there was still no scientific consensus or political acceptance of the idea that acid rain could fall as far as a thousand kilometers (600 miles) or more away from its pollution source. Nor was there much appreciation of the need for political action to address the transboundary and global nature of many pollution problems. Sweden used the UNCHE to bring international attention to the problem of transboundary acid rain and other increasingly pressing global environmental concerns.