Environmental Management

Understanding the Concept of Environmental Management

Photo courtesy of OECD.orgOpens in new window Environmental management, though difficult to define (as some authors claim), Barrow (2005) acknowledged it to be a goal or vision, an attempt to steer a process, an application of a set of tools and a philosophical exercise seeking to establish new perspectives towards the environment and human societies.

Environmental management therefore involves many stakeholders and consists in many spatial scales, ranging from the local to the global. It also involves many divers goals, including the desire to control the direction and pace of development, to optimize resource use, to minimize environmental degradation and to avoid environmental disaster.

Indeed, in many parts of the world (and arguably worldwide), environmental management is intimately linked with pressing issues of justice and even of survival. Thus the concept of environmental management is closely related to another important (and problematic) concept: that of sustainable development.

Environmental Managers And Their Growing Interest in Environmental Issues

Little, if any, of the world, is nowadays wholly “natural”, in the sense that it is unaltered by human activity. An eminent scientist recently suggested that the current geological unit, the Holocene, should be ended and succeeded by the Anthropocene, or “human-altered”, Period.

Humans are not the only organisms to alter the environment; photosynthetic algae and bacteria formed the Earth’s free atmospheric oxygen roughly 2,500 million years ago, and have maintained it at about 21 percent of the total gas mix ever since.

Also, marine plankton can affect could cover, and remove carbon from the atmosphere and deposit it as carbonates on the seabed. Life and the abiotic environment are in all probability unconsciously working together maintaining balances (the Gaia HypothesisOpens in new window).

However, humans uniquely have the potential to consciously interact with the environment and to proactively manage it. Whether humans realize their potential or continue to neglect, mismanage and destroy the global balance remains to be seen. Environmental management seeks to achieve that potential to maintain a global balance, and if possible, improve people’s well being.

All individuals are to some extent involved in environmental management because their activities ultimately have an impact. Some individuals are more actively involved in resource use and interact more with Nature: fishermen, pastoralists, special interest groups, academics, applied researchers, administrators, government advisers and so on.

Often they are familiar with a specific sector, region or ecosystem — for example, dealing with tropical forests, coastal zones, mountain areas, petrochemical production and tourism. They may have sufficient powers to implement change, or have to consult others and lobby to try and achieve anything, or they may just be advisers.

Within larger businesses and government organizations, the environmental manager is generally a mid-level executive who oversees various specialists who collect data, monitor and research; he or she then takes the data to advise more senior management and develop strategic policy.

An increasing number of companies or organizations maintain or hire in teams to establish and maintain an environmental management system (EMS), which helps develop, implement and review environmental policy.

There are environmental managers who focus on understanding what is happening, monitoring for critical thresholds – points beyond which further change presents challenges – auditing performance and conditions. Others are more concerned with predicting the future, or policy making, or enforcement of environmental protection, or neglecting agreements, or establishing workable procedures.

There is a diversity of environmental managers, but most share some or all of the following characteristics:

• They make deliberate efforts to steer the development process to take advantage of opportunities
• They ensure no critical limits are exceeded
• They try to avoid threats
• They mitigate problems
• They prepare people for unavoidable difficulties by improving adaptability and resilience (Erickson & King, 1999).

As emphasized earlier, environmental management is oriented to cope with natural threats and problems caused by human activity, it has to do this in a world where nature is being degraded, and it has to support livelihoods and steer these to ensure sustainable development.

Environmental issues are so intertwined with socio-economic issues that it has to be sensitive to them, especially in poor developing countries – environmental management is “. . . of a single piece with survival and justice …” (Athanasiou, 1997: 15). Environmental management has to do all this in a “real world” where:

• Greed, corruption and foolishness conspire to hinder.
• Poverty and growing populations limit the options available.
• Knowledge and technical skills are still too limited.
• Increasing numbers of people demand more and more material benefits.
• The time available to make real progress is limited.
• Natural and human disasters may happen.

While it is now accepted that environmental condition do not determine development success, attempts to “develop” in poor, tropical countries often face similar socio-economic and physical hindrances:

• High temperatures, erratic and sometimes extreme weather conditions and intense solar radiation frequently conspire to make water supply a challenge.
• Deeply weathered soils tend to rapidly lose organic carbon and are commonly poor in plant nutrients and rich in aluminium or iron compounds. These can easily suffer degradation.

• There are relatively complex biota, some of which are crop pests or disease vectors, with no marked cold season to control insects and weeds.
• Pest organisms develop rapidly thanks to warm conditions.
• Developmetn efforts have often taken the form of large-scale, costly and inflexible projects, frequently implemented in a hurry by expatriate consultants on short-term assignments. Also, there may be no recurrent funding.
• The benchmarks used to judge progress and success of development have commonly been inappropriate, paying attention to economic or engineering critieria, and giving too little attention to environmental and social issues.
• The developers may have inadequate local knowledge because they are frequently expatriates or overseas-trained city folk, and to be insensitive to poverty, socio-cultural issues and environment.
• Development is conducted against the clock: in order to achieve goals before a government runs out of its term of office, or so that contractors can get early completion bonuses, or to cut costs, or because there is a genuine sense of haste to achieve development.

• Hindsight experience is not adequately shared because it is restricted to limited-circulation consultancy reports or academic journals which poor countries cannot afford to access; also, post-development appraisals are seldom satisfactory because there is scarce funding, or those involved do not want to highlight “shortcomings”.
• The art of precautionary planning has evolved quite recently and is still being adapted to real-world conditions; consequently, it is easily side-stepped, or is applied too late to select the best development option, or it is misued or neglected, or just lacks the power to identify impacts well enough.
• Funding may be allocated to developments which satisfy powerful special interest groups or bolster national prestige, rather than produce maximum utility with minimum environmental and social impacts.
• Expatriate and indigenous “middle-class” experts and decision makers are reluctant to “rough it” in the countryside, leading to slow responses to problems and patchy oversight.
• Civil unrest and lack of investment conspire to prevent collection and maintenance of adequate baseline data, or servicing of infrastructure and law and order.

Enviromentalism, environmental management, environmental ethics, environmental legislation and techniques for monitoring and forecasting have mainly originated in the Western “liberal democracies”, and have had to adapt, or are still being adapted, to fit development countries.

Given that most of this has taken place in the last 30 years or so, there has been much progress. However, environmental management tools and methodology are still evolving, and the database of environmental and social knowledge for many developing countries is still woefully inadequate.