This is not a book about international law. However, to ignore the global dimension to contemporary environmental law would be almost wilfully misleading. In this Part, rather than attempting to describe and analyse international environmental law and international decision making processes, we focus on two issues in the international arena that are of particular salience for domestic and European environmental lawyers: the evolution of the concept of ‘sustainable development’ and the relationship between international trade rules and environmental protection.

International action to protect the environment rests on the commonplace reality that environmental problems respect no borders: pollution travels, and the degradation of certain environmental resources, such as the rainforests or atmospheric ozone, have immediate and more indirect global impacts. And just as environmental problems are increasingly global, so is a global solution increasingly necessary: one state's response to climate change, for example, is meaningless in isolation.