There have been scholarly debates concerning the function of law in a society. No law can ever fulfill all the needs and meet all the challenges in a society. It must change with the changing circumstances. In this context, law serves as a societal tool to combat problems at a given time or which may arise in the future. At global level, efforts have been made to grapple with some of the common concerns in recent years. The perceived debilitating effect of these common concerns, has led to the thinking that they need global solutions. It has, in turn, led to international legal restraints upon the behavior of the states. These legal restrains especially through treaty regimes and in some cases even soft instruments, seek to lay down threshold for certain activities carried out by the states at the domestic level rather than their outright prohibition per se.In some cases, such as the ozone depleting substances, specific substances have been phased out in a step-by-step manner through a consensual negotiated approach. As such, there has been growing centralization of law making in the field of environment.