Introduction The international treaty on the protection of the Alps (‘Alpine Convention’, hereafter ‘AC’) was signed during the Second International Alpine Conference on 7 November 1991 in Salzburg (Austria) by the representatives of the Alpine countries (Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Liechtenstein and Switzerland) and the European Community. The Republic of Slovenia signed the AC in March 1993 and the Principality of Monaco followed in 1994. The AC came into force on 6 March 1995. It constitutes a Multilateral Environmental Agreement (MEA) taking a specific regional geographical approach. The AC is an international legal instrument for sustainable development and is based on the awareness that environment and development have close interlinkages. It is an instrument that, with its all-encompassing and cross-border approach, has attained a special status among regional environmental agreements. Unlike other MEAs, the AC does not exclusively address certain ecosystems, habitat types and species, but instead has a very broad thematic scope relating to a whole mountain region. It can be therefore considered one of the general MEAs related to, among other aspects, biodiversity protection. Furthermore, in view of its geographic scope, the AC can be considered as being based on an ecosystem approach: it is the occurrence of certain geomorphological and biological characteristics that determines the geographical scope of application of the AC, rather than national or regional borders. The AC applies to an area of approximately 190,000 km2 across eight States, with a population of 14 million people. Austria and Italy account for about two-thirds of the area and population. Some twenty-five per cent of the territory of the AC is addressed through different protection regimes. Population density in the Alps is high if only the area suitable for human settlement is taken into account. For obvious reasons, the concentration of wilderness is greater at higher altitudes. The Western Alps account for eighty-one of the eighty-two peaks that exceed 4,000 metres in altitude (these are mostly concentrated around the Regions of Haute Savoie, Valle d’Aosta and Valais). Clearly, these least accessible regions, as well as some scarcely inhabited valleys in the Maritime, Cottian and Julian Alps, host the largest unspoiled natural areas. © Cambridge University Press 2016.