This article provides a quasi-constitutional justification for foreign environmental assistance. Part II of the article briefly reviews the history of the Tenth Amendment and its resuscitation by the United States Supreme Court. Part III examines how the Tenth Amendment has been used in the domestic environmental context to invalidate certain regulatory regimes and how the federal government has structured environmental programs to avoid infringing on state sovereignty. Part IV considers the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act as a statutory manifestation of Tenth Amendment principles. Part V explores the nature of national sovereignty and its implications for global environmental challenges. Part V analogizes Tenth Amendment principles to techniques employed by the international community to address specific environmental problems such as stratospheric ozone depletion, climate change, and the loss of biological diversity. Part VI analyzes the United States' commitments to help fund financial mechanisms established by the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, and the Convention on Biological Diversity. Part VI also examines the extent to which the United States is complying with its financial responsibilities under these conventions.

Part I of this article provides a brief background of the United States takings jurisprudence. It examines how the Fifth Amendment protects private property rights and when environmental regulation implicates the payment of just compensation. Part II reviews the methods by which the United States government seeks to protect the environment without infringing on private property rights, focusing on financial incentives and disincentives. Part III compares the many parallels between private property rights and national sovereignty. Part IV explores how lessons derived from the United States experience in balancing private property rights and environmental concerns are relevant to international environmental issues. It focuses on how the United States seeks to influence the environmental policy of other states through financial incentives and disincentives in multilateral and bilateral contexts. Concluding that such conditional assistance is consistent with the domestic principle of just compensation, the article offers a framework for when such assistance is justified.