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This article describes the birth of air pollutant regulation and its transformation, which, formerly under state control, moved on to a regime based on market instruments. The author shows the gradual commercialization of the approach to air pollution problems, whose origins can be traced to the United States, summarized in three different historic moments: the Emission Trading Program (1982), the Average between Refineries (1985), and the Acid Rain Program (1995). These experiments, in a framework of the command and control environmental regulatory regime, led to the creation of the first atmospheric contaminant emissions market in world history and opened up the road to the new "cap and trade" environmental regulatory regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A citizen complaint presented to the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) of North America is a non-binding mechanism used by civil society to denounce incompliance with US., Canadian, and Mexican environmental legislation. Using a data base of citizens' complaints (1996-2012), this article offers an evaluation of the mechanism in three areas: a) perceptible influence on the three North American governments; b) performance and influence on sub-national levels; and c) patterns of historic evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a balance sheet of the actions carried out by the Mexican-U.S. binational environmental agencies. The Border Environment Cooperation Commission (BECC) and the North American Development Bank (NADB), their projects and actions, are analyzed 16 years after NAFTA came into effect. The article emphasizes the challenges these agencies will face in coming years, given the increasing need to put into practice the development-environment binomial along the shared border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is the result of a study carried out by the Environmental law Research Area of Universidad del Rosario, within the project of environmental conflicts applied to international decisions. One of the topics discussed in this research is the analysis of relationships between Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) and the Free Trade Agreement, or Trade Promotion Agreement, which was entered into by Colombia and the United States of America (Col-USA FTA) with the purpose of determining the applicable norms and the possible conflicts that may arise between these treaties. The work will analyze the legal framework of international and environmental commercial law, environmental norms applicable to the FTA and the construction of the various agreements, so as to identify the main issues and the possible mechanisms to solve conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]