These Fact Sheets are a guide only and are no substitute for legal advice relating to your particular issue. If you need legal advice about your particular issue, please call our FREE Environmental Law Advice Line
Last updated: 27 August 2008
1.1 What is Environmental Law?
The EDO is a not-for-profit community legal centre specialising in public interest environmental law. We help individuals and community groups who are working to protect the natural and built environment. The EDO is part of a national network of centres that help to protect the environment through law in their States.
The EDO has developed into an environmental law centre with multi-disciplinary skills and a range of functions - legal, policy, science and community programs - which can be used on behalf of clients to resolve environmental issues.
Environmental law is the area of law that seeks to manage human impacts on the environment.
The “environment” refers to all aspects of the natural environment, including land, air, water, flora and fauna, and the human environment (both indigenous and non-indigenous cultural and built heritage).1
Environmental law exists at a local, State, national and international level.
It covers topics such as:
environmental planning and assessment;
natural resource management;
pollution management;
biodiversity conservation; and
natural and cultural heritage.
Functions of environmental law
The key functions of environmental law are to:
establish regulatory structures for environmental management, including regulatory agencies (eg the Environment Protection Authority2) and specialist courts and tribunals (eg the Land and Environment Court of NSW);
enable regulators to manage environmental impacts using plans, policies, standards, licences and incentives;
require persons proposing environmentally significant activities to obtain approval from regulators (eg development consent);
enable members of the public to take part in environmental planning and environmental assessment (eg through making submissions);
require activities of environmental significance to be assessed before permission can be granted (eg through an environmental impact statement);
provide administrative, civil and criminal penalties for breaches of the law;
allow the legality of the decisions of regulators to be challenged by members of the public (eg in the Land and Environment Court); and
allow the merits of certain decisions of regulators to be challenged by members of the public.
What is the purpose of these fact sheets?
In order to use environmental law to protect the environment, it is important to understand not only the laws themselves but how to use them to best advantage.
The EDO has prepared these fact sheets to assist the public in understanding how they can actively engage with decision-makers and influence decisions about the environment. The fact sheets identify the opportunities for public participation in environmental decisions.
Some legislation contains a definition of ‘environment”, for example: the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979, s 4, contains a very broad definition which states that “environment includes all aspects of the surroundings of humans, whether affecting any human as an individual or in his or her social groupings”
The NSW EPA is now part of the NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water.
