环境公共利益在本质上可以还原为不特定多数人独立享受生态服务功能的私人利益。为避免产权主体虚设导致的“公地悲剧”，作为生态服务功能载体的自然资源由象征意义上的全民所有走向实质意义上的国家所有。自然资源开发利用中的市场失灵以及生态环境保护中的政府失灵使得公共执法难以独立承担起保护环境公共利益的重任。在公共信托理论的解释框架下，自然资源的国家所有权被烙上社会公共财产的印迹，任何公民在理论上都可以通过环境公益诉讼对公共执法进行补充或监督。然而，为防止形式当事人滥诉、降低公益诉讼激励成本，环境公益诉讼适格原告应当仅向私益受害人扩张。为确保预防或修复环境损害的规模效应和克服环境民事公益诉讼缺乏惩罚性赔偿制度的弊端，环境公益诉讼适格被告应当涵盖环保机关。

Environmental public welfare in essence can be defined as the private benefit that an unspecified number of people enjoy the ecosystem services independentlyNatural resources，as carrier of ecosystem services，turn from the symbolic whole citizens ownership to state ownership in substantive sense so as to avoid the“tragedy of the commons”caused by fake property rights Market failures in both natural resources development and utilization as well as government failures in environmental protection have warned that maintaining environmental public welfare through public enforcement alone is no longer realistic In the framework of public trust theory，state ownership of natural resources is imprinted with public property Principal citizenship has authorized individual victims who have lost trust in public law enforcement to legitimately file environmental public welfare litigation，while the government as trustee has laid the theoretical foundation for us to build environmental administrative public welfare litigation on the interpretation theory.