The League of Nations (LoN) was established in 1920, to which a non-governmental organization turned with an initiative to extend the LoN mandate to deal with environmental hazards of international importance. The submission also included the idea of setting up a commission for nature protection and first of all, elaborating an international convention to curb marine oil pollution as soon as possible. However, none of these proposals were accepted: obviously, compared to other critical global problems, environmental matters were perceived as marginal [Wöbse, 20081]. Yet a few multilateral nature conservation conventions were concluded a few years later (in 1933 and 1940),2 and there were several such legal instruments even in the early part of the century that were primarily guided by the economic interests of the contracting parties.3 Environmental cooperation efforts revived after the Second World War. Learning from earlier international confrontations over natural resources, the rapidly changing global political situation and the expanding body of environmental science led the UN, its specialized agencies, and other organizations to show growing interest in the environmental dimension of the accelerating globalization processes.