Conservation covenants are an innovative legal mechanism that modify private property rights to promote biodiversity benefits. Their use is increasing as governments encourage private land conservation to help meet national and global biodiversity goals, such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. However, existing use of covenants from a variety of countries, including Australia, New Zealand and the United States, highlights some limitations. There is limited explicit accommodation of changing circumstances such as climate impacts; insufficient support to landowners and a need for increased environmental monitoring and compliance oversight. Several actions could be taken to ameliorate these and other law-related impediments, including improved reciprocity between parties to covenants, designing covenants with greater flexibility, and improving integrity mechanisms.

An important influence on the historical evolution of Australia's conservation movement was cinema. Documentary films about travel, commonly known as "travelogues", were often used to promote nature-based tourism and recreation. They had particular salience in Tasmania, where the government sought to use the island's natural heritage to define the state's identity, establishing a specialist film unit for this purpose. Three distinct narratives about nature and its conservation were developed in these Tasmanian travelogues from the 1920s to the 1970s, with the government increasingly interested in promoting the idea that extractive industries such as forestry and hydropower could be compatible with or improve the aesthetic and recreational appeal of wild nature. Thus, while nature travelogues could assist conservationism, including to facilitate the establishment of national parks, they also unleashed ideas that posed a risk to that agenda.

Reform to Australia's primary federal environmental legislation - the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Cth) ("EPBC Act") - has returned to the spotlight. After failing to pass its reform agenda through the last parliament, the Australian government introduced amending legislation in November 2025 and, after a short period of intense negotiation, an amended EPBC Act passed the parliament in December 2025. While shortfalls in the scope and effectiveness of the EPBC Act have drawn much scholarly critique over the past two decades, this critique does not typically articulate an analytical framework against which to evaluate reforms or standards for guiding new statutory or policy amendments. We define and characterise, for the first time, a nascent tool, "legal design principles", as a guide to future, more-ambitious law reform for an uncertain and challenging future. This tool also offers a standard for critically assessing legal reforms such as the EPBC Act reforms. In this article, we (1) define what legal design principles are, (2) articulate core characteristics of legal design principles and their value in guiding future law reform and (3) briefly examine how this tool might help us to critically and transparently assess the EPBC Act reforms against ambitious global priorities.

The recent push for private land conservation in Australia has relied on statutory conservation covenants. Historically, by contrast, freehold restrictive covenants were used to safeguard environmental amenity values, particularly with development of garden suburbs. However, their potential contribution to private land conservation has received little attention today. An analysis of the design and implementation of conservation covenants compared to restrictive covenants suggests that whilst conservation covenants are more advantageous, they do not exclude a role for restrictive covenants in certain circumstances. Furthermore, statutory municipal planning covenants may provide another option for motivated landowners. Overall private land conservation in Australia should be better supported by a combination of these covenants.

Conservation covenants are a key legal mechanism for permanently protecting biodiversity on private land in Australia and elsewhere. Yet their contribution to national and global targets for expanding conservation and restoration areas remains limited. This constraint arises not only from the traditional view of covenants as instruments of passive conservation but also from the limited incentives and benefits available to participating landholders. A central governance challenge lies in reconceptualizing reciprocity within covenanting relationships. Reciprocal arrangements should recognize the diversity of landholders' values and motivations that shape participation decisions, while also reflecting shared responsibility for environmental stewardship. Current Australian legal frameworks and practices insufficiently articulate or operationalize reciprocity in ways that accommodate these considerations. We propose a more principled and systematic approach to reciprocity to strengthen the effectiveness, equity, and long-term impact of conservation covenants in advancing biodiversity protection and ecological restoration on private land.

Conservation covenants and easements are legal mechanisms for private landholders to contribute to long-term protection of natural values. This book furnishes a unique international legal and policy study of how covenants and easements in seven jurisdictions are supporting global biodiversity goals, and it considers how they may address new challenges associated with ecosystem restoration and climate change. It compares laws in Australia, Belgium (Flanders), Canada, Chile, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States, countries where these mechanisms are increasingly used to support national and global goals of relevance to Earth System Governance. Through interjurisdictional comparison, the book analyses key themes, including recruitment and retention of landholders into conservation agreements, climate adaptation and compliance. This study also offers practical advice on potential directions for law reform or improved implementation of existing covenants and easements law. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The native forestry industry is being reconsidered, or actively phased out, across most parts of Australia. This kind of transition has happened elsewhere in the world but, in Australia, there is no clarity from governments about what those forestry areas will become, from an ecological or legal perspective. In this research, we investigate the ecological, climatic, and governance contexts for this transition away from native forestry, placing our results in the context of the Global Biodiversity Framework's push to restore 30% of the Earth's land, coasts and oceans. We demonstrate important gaps in government planning for the future of former native forestry coupes, arguing that “after forestry” many of these places will need active intervention to recover these ecosystems and address historic land degradation. This case study combines legal analysis with a review of the restoration literature to illustrate the importance of the governance framework within which restoration science is evolving. We demonstrate the complexity of governing restoration at large scales as the climate changes, as well as potential opportunities to reconcile fragmented governance arrangements, to ensure that this transition results in resilient forest ecosystems in currently degraded areas.

Conservation covenants are an important legal tool for enabling private land conservation, whose significance to policymakers has recently grown in light of new global commitments to expand areas of land and water protected and restored. Covenants’ traditional focus on conservation of existing natural values rather than restoration of degraded land or active management of environments impacted by climate change pose significant challenges to the flexibility and efficacy of this legal instrument. In Australia, recent national legal reforms to incentivise private land conservation, notably the new Nature Repair Act 2023, will need to consider how it can align with conservation covenanted lands that are regulated by different laws with different criteria and goals. Here we identify some pathways for enabling conservation covenants to play an expanded role in the context of ecosystem restoration and climate adaptation.

Film has played a seminal role in Australian environmental history, as an instrument of advocacy to shape political disputes and government actions. Such cinematic activism originated in the 1960s with the dispute over the damming of Tasmania's iconic Lake Pedder. Here, documentary filmmaking was used by the protagonists to influence public opinion and convey rival views of the remote wilderness lake. For conservationists, film helped build an emotional connection and sense of place, whilst for pro-dam proponents, film helped curate an ideology of economic progress. The protagonists' mutually reinforcing tactics, especially the intermediary role of the Tasmanian Department of Film Production, combined with the outstanding beauty of Lake Pedder, drove the turn to cinematic activism. Understanding how these films were produced and screened is also important to appreciating their significance for cinematic activism.

This article examines the role of conservation covenants in achieving biodiversity conservation on private property owned by First Nations in Australia. The application of conservation covenants to land held by First Nations has yet to be closely researched, and our article examines through case studies, the specific legal and governance issues that arise in this context and pathways to improve governance. This research has relevance to Australia's new commitment to increased protected area targets and the nation-wide momentum to reset the relationship between First Nations and non-Indigenous Australians, which is delivering emerging opportunities for First Nations' involvement in biodiversity governance. The article demonstrates that conservation covenants are becoming more relevant to First Nations but they potentially require some legal customisation to suit the needs of First Nations landowners.

New social movements for climate justice, notably Extinction Rebellion (XR) and the youth-led climate strikes, are spearheading pressure to reshape climate politics and governance. These movements seek to overtly disobey authorities in an effort to bring pressure for fast change. They also emphasize disobedience through aestheticized means, harnessing the arts in distinctive and creative ways to maximize publicity, gain supporters, and facilitate change. This climate justice activism raises two important questions: how can aesthetic strategies contribute to the messaging and publicizing of climate justice advocacy; and second, how effective is this aesthetic activism in promoting climate action, especially by governments? A survey of current scholarly research and case studies on XR and the youth-organized climate strikes helps to understand these questions.

The `lawscape' (landscape) of public participation in environmental decision making in Australia is evolving as climate change has become society's dominant environmental concern. The traditional modes for citizens to express their concerns through administrative and legislative processes are losing their legitimacy and efficacy. The growth of civil disobedience by climate protesters is a response to this deficit. Rather than viewing such dissent as purely a phenomenon `outside' the legal system, in defiance of the law, climate protest can also plausibly be understood as a shift in the mode of public participation within the legal system as discussions about climate science and action extend to new forums, especially courtrooms hearing criminal prosecutions against climate activists.

This landmark book unveils the history of defending Australia’s natural environment and examines the subject’s legal and political contexts from the birth of the nation in 1901 until the advent of the so-called modern era of environmental regulation in the late 1960s. Across nature conservation, pollution control, natural resources governance and other domains, this book reveals how many of today’s environmental laws emerged from precedents or events much earlier in the 20th century.The history is told through analysis of lawmakers’ far greater efficacy to exploit rather than protect the environment, a discrepancy that grew as nature’s backlash intensified in a rapidly degrading continent colonised to build the Australian nation. In exploring these dynamics, the book offers a rich tapestry of case studies illustrated with historic photographs that show the origins of Australia’s environmental laws and how they borrowed from international precedents or furnished lessons for other nations to consider.Through its multi-disciplinary enquiry, the book offers scholars and students of environmental law, legal history and the environmental humanities a unique story about the failures and successes in the making of environmental law.

Summary We synthesise the findings from 10 years of ecological restoration in the Midlands of Tasmania, Australia, captured in the series of 14 papers in this special issue of Ecological Management and Restoration. The papers illustrate how expertise from disciplines as diverse as law, economics, social sciences, the arts, education, zoology, botany, genetics, climate modelling, agriculture, spatial sciences and fire ecology are necessary to address the complex social, ecological and financial questions that underpin restoration ecology. We highlight the complexity of the task, the multi‐disciplinary and collaborative approach needed, the importance of science to inform restoration practice and the problem of achieving functional connectivity. We also outline steps that need to be taken in the next 10 years. Together, the outcomes and recommendations from these studies provide a template for restoration in similar highly cleared and degraded agricultural landscapes affected by climate change in Australia and internationally.

Abstract This chapter studies how, in the study of international environmental law, business corporations are typically viewed as actors under the auspices of various regulatory regimes developed by nation-states, or recognized as having some tacit influence over the agenda setting and implementation of such regimes. This perspective might also acknowledge the limited accountability of corporations under international law. Another perspective is the business sector's initiative in shaping its own environmental agenda, often in the name of ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR). The chapter then surveys the role of corporate law and corporate governance in shaping environmental performance, and introduces the goals, mechanisms, and actors of the global CSR movement. It examines the governance of business in international environmental law, including corporate liability for wrongdoing. The chapter also looks at examples of new forms of multi-stakeholder environmental collaboration involving the business sector.

Wilderness is vanishing. Despite explicit legislative protection of values for over half a century, rapid environmental degradation worldwide in recent decades has severely diminished the extent and quality of terrestrial and marine to the point where we must reassess the fundamental premises and future of law. With increased human demands on the natural world, and with climate breakdown looming, the very notion of wilderness itself may one day be considered meaningless or irrelevant. We examine legal developments in the United States, Australia, and Europe to critically evaluate the state of law. In this Anthropocene era, when humans control so much of Earth’s resources, we examine whether the law should aim for a purist approach, in which areas are simply left untouched, or a pragmatic‘ approach, in which is actively managed to maintain its cherished values in the face of mounting adversity. A variety of intermediary positions are conceivable between these endpoints, and the best approach to management will likely depend on several considerations including who or what wilderness is meant to serve, the geographic and biological features of the landscape, environmental threats the area faces, the presence of Indigenous or other local communities, and the values that the guiding law means to serve. We offer recommendations to improve law to navigate the Anthropocene. We suggest proceeding with care and humility, staying as close to purism as possible, while acknowledging that sometimes we must take a pragmatic approach and intervene to preserve the qualities our laws are designed to protect.