A/HRC/34/49 organizations and enable civil suits that seek to intimidate and silence environmental defenders.54 B. Substantive obligations 33. States have obligations to adopt legal and institutional frameworks that effectively protect against environmental harm that interferes with the enjoyment of human rights. As section II describes, the loss of ecosystem services and biodiversity threatens a broad spectrum of rights, including the rights to life, health, food, water, culture and nondiscrimination. States therefore have a general obligation to safeguard biodiversity in order to protect those rights from infringement. That obligation includes a duty to protect against environmental harm from private actors, and businesses have a responsibility to respect the rights relating to biodiversity as well (see A/HRC/25/53, paras. 58-61). 34. States have discretion to strike a balance between environmental protection and other legitimate societal goals. But the balance must be reasonable, and it should never result in unjustified, foreseeable infringements of human rights. In the context of environmental harm generally, human rights bodies have identified factors that help to clarify whether a reasonable balance has been struck, which include whether the measure in question is the result of a process that complied with the procedural obligations described in the previous section, whether it is non-retrogressive, whether it is non-discriminatory and whether it accords with international and domestic standards (see A/HRC/25/53, paras. 5356). Finally, States should fully implement their laws protecting human rights related to the environment. 35. The specific contours of substantive obligations may vary by situation. In addition to a general duty to protect biodiversity in order to support the full enjoyment of the range of human rights that depend upon it and the ecosystem services it underpins, States may also have more specific duties to protect places or components of biodiversity that are especially necessary for the enjoyment of rights of the members of particular communities, including the vulnerable communities discussed in the next section. 36. States should also cooperate with one another to protect biodiversity and ecosystem services. As the Special Rapporteur has previously explained (see A/HRC/31/52, paras. 4248), international cooperation normally plays only a supporting role in the protection of human rights, but some types of environmental harm to human rights may trigger the duty of international cooperation, which has support in the general practice of States and, more specifically, in the Charter of the United Nations (arts. 55-56) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (art. 2). The effective protection of biodiversity, like the effective mitigation of climate change, is possible only with international cooperation, as States have often recognized. Many of the components of biodiversity, the threats to biodiversity and the benefits biodiversity provides have transboundary or global dimensions. 37. For over a century, States have entered into treaties to protect components of biodiversity that straddle or migrate across borders, such as transboundary water bodies and migratory animals. 55 In more recent decades, States have increasingly realized the many 54 55 12 See the report by the Special Rapporteur entitled “Environmental human rights defenders: a global crisis”, at www.universal-rights.org. The many examples include the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, the Agreement for the Implementation of the Provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 10 December 1982 relating to the Conservation and Management of