* Originally promoted through a small ad hoc pre-Conference committee consisting of F. Kenneth Hare, Gilbert F. White, and Victor A. Kovda, with powers to co-opt. Drafted early in the Conference by the first-named, amended and generally approved by the Thursday evening session, and subsequently amended in consultation with, particularly, John H. Burnett, John L. Cloudsley-Thompson, Martin W. Holdgate, Donald F. McMichael, Jean Medawar, Gunavant M. Oza, Nicholas Polunin, Jan W.M. la Rivière, Christopher D. Stone, Francis L. Dale, Gabor Vida, Arthur H. Westing, and David P.S. Wasawo. Passed at the final session of the Conference and subsequently edited as necessary.

The idea of an Imperative originated with Richard G. Miller and follows ‘The Reykjavik Imperative on the Environment and Future of Mankind’, which was drafted during the 2nd ICEF, held in Iceland in 1977, by a committee under the chairmanship of Linus Pauling and published in the proceedings thereof, while further inspiration for the Budapest Imperative was derived from the opening keynote address entitled ‘Overview: Our Threatened World’, by Martin W. Holdgate, and from the Third Baer–Huxley Memorial Lecture, entitled ‘Building An Environmental Institutional Framework for the Future’, by Mostafa K. Tolba, which is published with his permission in this issue of Environmental Conservation (Vol. 17, No. 2, Summer 1990, pp. 105–10). — Ed.