If you’ll permit me, I’ll say the question is not whether the south has bad policies or whether southern policies are worse than northern, but why this happens.

The problem with the environmental policies of the global north is that they are secondary to imperialism and the pursuit of profit. As the global south is subjugated by the north, any bad environmental policies in the south are due to northern, imperialist meddling. So places in the south could have just as bad environmental policies as in the north but where this happens, it is usually dictated by the north.

It’s similar with austerity and neoliberalism: countries in the global south sell off national assets and rights to national resources, as well as cutting worker protections, etc, as a condition of accepting loans from the IMF. Those loans are usually necessary – however wealthy the country really is (African states, especially, are super rich in natural resources) – because countries that refuse IMF loans are then excluded from international networks of finance, distribution, technology, oil production/refinement, etc.

This is partly why multipolarity is going to shake things up so much. If a country in the global south currently wants to develop an industry, it has to pump it’s own oil, send that oil somewhere else for refinement, buy back the same-but-refined oil, and only then it can feed that oil into its domestic industries. It just include the extra steps because oil must be bought in dollars (unipolar petrodollar), and the US requires that if you want dollars, you have to follow US rules (and the US does not want certain countries to be self sustainable, so they cannot be allowed to develop the capacity e.g. to refine (their own) oil).

When countries in the south can buy oil in Rupees or Yuan, for example, they will have more freedom to avoid the US dollar, which means they’ll have more freedom to avoid IMF loans (which are a way of getting dollars) and so avoid the conditions attached to those loans. This will create room to improve their environmental policies.

If you still want to make a comparison, if suggest that as China and Cuba are in the global south, they do enough to make the whole of the global south do slightly better than the global north.

You might enjoy Jason Hickel’s work in this area: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X. There’s more work on his website: https://www.jasonhickel.org/research. If you want to read something a little less academic of his, try: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/4/4/who-is-responsible-for-climate.

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Yes in general before the intrusion of Neo-Liberalism from the Bretton Woods Insititutions of Western European diaspora for establishment by corrupted puppet governments who support criminal activities from foreign corporations. Who would want to store all the toxic chemical waste that kill the food sources, contaminate food that people eat, poison water supplies that were naturally generated, destroy gardens, and create air pollution that cause respitory problems. Even the fourth world North American First Nations in the Global North do not want racist white corporations to dump enormous amounts of toxic waste into the federal reserves where the European immigrants imprisoned the many Indigenous and mixed Indigenous groups until very recently. The global north do not have better environmental polices, only better slogans and free riding support to racist white people who can plagiarize the achievements that people of color made to environmentalism to stop the planned pollution into the residence of the people of color even before the European diaspora invent their early fake environmental movements with Paganism and savagery.

Ecuador under the government of Rafael Correa moved from burning fossil fuels for electric generation to an entirely renewable energy matrix dominated by hydro-electric generation. He also proposed that global north nations pay to keep fossil fuels under the ground in the south to combat climate change without leaving us entirely out of the benefits of such development. Ultimately the project to leave oil under thr ground failed when foreign governments insisted the money not go to the central government but instead be administered by a trust which donors would have a large say over and the rising oil prices made such offers insufficient and overly conditioned - nonetheless a pioneering proposal and a shame that it wasn’t concluded successfully.

In addition to what @redtea said, countries like China and Nicaragua have far better environmental policy than the imperialists, not only because they are more affected, but also mostly because they are socialist. If you want more resources on China’s sustainability you can ask.

As far as I know there is no such thing as “Environmental Police” anywhere, north or south. But if there’s any sort of police I would support its the kind that protects the environment.