EDO is a highly professional multi-disciplinary legal service working with communities across Australia & the Pacific to defend the environment through law. With the support of people like you, we design better laws to solve our most pressing problems, and empower people to use the law to protect our environment and everything that depends on it for survival.

As a non-profit, non-government organisation, EDO relies on community support to help fund our programs and services. You can help provide legal services and scientific advice to people from all walks of life seeking to safeguard our precious water sources, defend our wildest places, and protect our natural and built environment. make a real difference to the environment by making a generous donation today.

A member of the National Association of Community Legal Centres, EDOs have been part of the Australian legal landscape for over 30 years.  In 2013, Federal funding, was abruptly terminated, ending nearly 20 years of bipartisan support for these vital community legal services. In the absence of government support, it is vital that EDO maintains the strength of its financial base through a diversity of sources, and especially private funding.

At the end of 2019, as our unique Australian animals and plants faced extinction and global warming really began to bite, eight EDOs across the country joined forces to unite as a single, stronger, truly national Environmental Defenders Office.

The work of skilled and experienced EDO staff improves access to environmental justice to thousands of Australians every year:

Holding environmental decision-makers and proponents to account where environmental laws are breached;

• Empowering communities through community workshops and producing easy to understand guides to environmental laws, to enable participation in environmental management and decisions;
• Providing free or low cost legal advice and representation in courts in public interest environmental litigation; and
• Providing expert input to government and non-government enforcement and law reform programs that are designed to protect the environment and our natural resources.

There is a particular demand for our services in rural and remote communities, where access to justice is uniquely compromised. We assist Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people concerned about the destruction of their cultural heritage or whose health has been affected by contaminated water supplies, families affected by air pollution resulting from open-cut mining and farmers whose livelihoods are threatened by the many complicated issues resulting from the impacts of resource extraction projects.

We are often the only service in Australia that can provide the impartial expert advice and assistance such members of the Australian community need and deserve:

"If we hadn't found EDO, we couldn't have done it. The courts are a foreign place and speak a foreign language." John Greacen, Semi-retired grazier, opposing a proposed feedlot on the Condamine floodplain, Central Queensland

"Small communities such as ours do not have the knowledge or necessary resources to buy in the expertise to achieve an even playing field with well funded, well-connected and powerful developers. EDO has provided access to justice for our community and has held decision-makers to account." Suzanne Whyte, Catherine Hill Bay Progress Association, NSW

Together, with your support, our team of environmental law experts will work with passion and dedication to fight the legal battles needed to keep our climate safe and our communities healthy.

But there’s no time to waste – we need your help today! Your donation to the Environmental Defence Fund will help people fighting for environmental justice right across Australia and the South Pacific.

Please note: We'd like to stay in touch. Donors to EDO will be sent email communication from time-to-time, including our fortnightly e-bulletin with news on the environment, law reform, legal cases, events and more. Feel free to opt out at anytime.