When the Australia Labor Party (led at the time by Kevin Rudd) was elected to federal office in November 2007, almost two years into the period under review, many commentators anticipated a substantial and substantive change in Australia’s foreign environmental policy. The change in rhetoric before and after November 2007 was, indeed, pronounced. These were governments with apparently very different world views: Labor articulating an internationalist and multilateralist model of international relations and global governance, and the Coalition eschewing ‘ideology’ and idealism in favour of what it saw as a hard-headed realism and a willingness to walk away from multilateral opportunities that did not deliver the outcomes they wanted.

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.