This is intended as a broad introduction to the interdisciplinary approaches that are necessary to understand complex ecosystems and human impacts upon them. Environmental lawyers are not technical experts in many of these areas but they need to access expertise and use it to identify environmental problems and potential legal strategies and options. Environmental legislation and case law is usually a part of a wider project involving institutional capacity building, education (technical and social), pure and applied research (into the environmental problems), public participation, economic measures (taxes, subsidies, environmental technology transfer or preferential or subsidised terms) and providing the financial resources to implement this wider project including compliance and enforcement aspects. Often these financial resources may have to be found by increasing productivity or cuts in other budget areas or through funding sources such as the Asian Development Bank (ADB), World Bank, the Global Environment Facility, funds under environmental treaties and foreign aid. Environmental legislation will not work well unless the causes of environmental degradation are understood and legislative responses are integrated into the wider social project. Institutionalcapacity to implement and enforce legislation, its appropriateness in the context of a particular history and culture, the exploration of innovative approaches and the provision of adequate resources are issues that will be explored in more detail later.