At the Common Core meeting of 1995 a “Working Agenda” was presented to the “Group on Property” with the aim of facing the problem of individualizing the common core of European Private Law in the field of property as related to the environment.

It was pointed out that this is actually a field where not only private law, but also many other components play a very important role. As the purpose of the Trento project is basically one of private law, the aim of the Working Agenda and of the following Questionnaire was to focus on the particular question: “Who owns the environment?” On this basis, the “Group on Property”, agreed to give the author the task, as co-ordinator of the project on “Property and Environment”, of drafting the questionnaire applying the methodology decided in Trento.

The first version of the questionnaire was presented at the Common Core meeting of 1996 and revised after a discussion with the national reporters and the chairman of the session “Property”, Professor Antonio Gambaro. The revised version was then circulated to environmental law experts from different European countries.

This volume contains case studies from thirteen European jurisdictions, representing civil law countries, common law countries and Nordic countries in a balanced way. It is divided in two main parts: the first one contains three introductory chapters where the authors try to sketch out the general scenario in an historical and comparative law perspective; the second one includes, after a short description of the working agenda and the questionnaire, the case studies of the thirteen European jurisdictions.