The past decade has seen tremendous development of international legal protections for the environment and public health. Many nations have ratified numerous multilateral environmental agreements to protect the air, water, land, and biodiversity. Despite these efforts to confront environmental and public health problems, the public concern over environmental threats seems to have increased rather than decreased. A key reason for this is the failure of many countries and their leaders to implement adequately or enforce the standards in these new MEAs to overcome the mounting problems that the MEAs were designed to combat.