This glossary integrates a wealth of policy, legal, management and technical terms that were selected according to one key criterion: each of them had to be used in environmental compliance promotion and enforcement or have significance for this field.

This Manual expands upon Guidelines on Compliance with and Enforcement of MultilateralEnvironmental Agreements (MEAs). Many States participated in the developmentand negotiation of the Guidelines, which were adopted by the UNEP GoverningCouncil in 2002. While this Manual is not a negotiated document, it also is the result ofa collaborative process involving a wide range of numerous individuals around the world.These people assisted in drafting case studies and other contributions, reviewing the text,and suggesting substantive and formatting changes.

This reference manual provides a list of approximately 300 technical terms and phrases common to environmental engineering which non-English speakers often find difficult to understand in English. The manual provides the terms and phrases in alphabetical order, followed by a concise English definition, then a translation of the term in Russian and, finally, an interpretation or translation of the term or phrase in Russian. Following the Russian translations section, the columns are reversed and reordered alphabetically in Russian with the English term and translation following the Russian term or phrase.The objective is to provide a technical term reference manual for non-English speaking students and engineers who are familiar with Russian, but uncomfortable with English and to provide a similar reference for English speaking students and engineers working in an area of the world where the Russian language predominates