The society had a flying start as it was established
simultaneously with the publication of the Brundtland
Report and the second wave of public and political interest in environmental issues, as described in
Section 4. As can be seen from Table 1, the conferences
immediately attracted a large number of
participants, and the conference in Costa Rica in
1994 became a mixture of an academic conference
and a popular event also attracting a large number of
practitioners in the environmental field. The membership
rose very quickly to more than 1600 members,
and in the mid-1990s a number of regional societies
were established (