The nature of Australia’s economy and ecosystem ensures that Australian governments have taken a continued interest in the negotiations for, and implications of, most of the world’s multilateral environmental agreements. Australia has an energy-intensive economy. Agriculture and extractive industries, both of which have had severe environmental consequences, contribute significantly to export earnings. The country is both highly urbanised (around 85 per cent of the population lives in cities) and the world’s only industrialised ’mega-diverse’ country, custodian of about 10 per cent of the world’s biodiversity. Australia is also one of the few industrialised countries that suffers extensive desertification – over half of the country’s land area is in need of some form of repair. Australia’s exclusive economic zone – 11 million square kilometres of marine waters – is one of the largest in the world. Australia’s environmental role in world affairs includes its domestic responses to environmental treaty obligations and its commitment to sustainable development both at home and abroad.

In conventional institutional terms, Australia’s role in world environmental affairs is the product of its foreign policy on regional and global environmental issues and its domestic implementation of formal treaty obligations and other commitments. Australia’s ecological profile provides good reason for governments of whatever political hue to take a keen interest in international negotiations to manage transboundary and global pollution, protect the world’s species and ecosystems, and advance the cause of sustainable development. Australia has one of the world’s most variable climates and is, with the exception of the Antarctic, the world’s driest continent. As the drought conditions that beset the country in the first half of the period under review demonstrate, the country is susceptible to water stress. Australia is one of the few industrialised countries that suffers from severe desertification, and it is the only developed country among the ten in the world that qualify as mega-diverse in their fauna and flora. As a country ‘girt by sea’, protecting the oceans from pollution and resources therein from over-exploitation is a key policy objective.