Evolution of environmental management

1. Environmental
Management for
Sustainable Development
Gemrex D. Breva

2. Environmental management is a wide, expanding, and rapidly
evolving field, which concerns all humans, and plays a crucial
role in the quest for sustainable development. Environmental
management affects everybody from individual citizens,
farmers, administrators and lawyers, to businesses,
governments, international agencies and nongovernmental
organizations.

3. What motivates environmental management?

4. 1. Pragmatic reasons – fear or common sense makes people or
administrators seek to avoid a problem.
2. Desire to save costs – it may be better to avoid problems or counter
them than suffer the consequences: pollution, species extinction, human
deaths, costly litigation. There may also be advantages in waste recovery,
energy conservation and maintaining environmental quality.
3. Compliance – individuals, local government, companies, states and
so on may be required by laws, national or international agreement to
care for the environment.

5. 4. Shift in ethics – research, the media, individuals or
groups of activists may trigger new attitudes, agreements
or laws.
5. Macro-economics – promotion of environmental management
may lead to economic expansion: a market for pollution control
equipment, use of recovered waste, more secure and efficient
energy and raw materials supply; or there may be advantages
in ‘internalizing externalities’.

6. Environmental management may need to modify the activities and
ethics of individuals, groups and societies to achieve its goals.
There are three main approaches which can be adopted to try to
do that:
1. Advisory
through education;
through demonstration;
through the media
through advice
2. Economic or fiscal
through taxation (‘green’ taxes);
through grants, loans, aid;
through subsidies;
through quotas or trade agreements.
3 Regulatory
● through standards and laws;
● through restrictions and monitoring;
● through licensing;
● through zoning (restricting activities to a given area).

7. As if it is not enough to have to deal with complexity,
incomplete knowledge and poor data, the environmental
manager often has to cope with situations where the
development objectives and strategy have already been
decided by politicians, special-interest groups, aid agencies,
company directors and so on. Environmental management
may also have to proceed in a piecemeal manner, with
inadequate jurisdiction, insufficient time to act effectively, and
public and administrative mood swings (Trudgill, 1990).
Environmental managers may be faced with a crisis-
management (reactive, short-term response) situation even
though one of their principles is anticipatory planning (Scher,
1991).

8. Environmental management may be subdivided into the following components:
1. Advisory
● advice, leaflets, phone help-line;
● media information (which can be covert, i.e. hidden in entertainment or open);
● education;
● demonstration (e.g. model farm).
2. Economic
● taxes;
● grants, loans, aid;
● subsidies;
● quotas.
3. Regulatory/Control
● standards;
● restrictions;
● licensing of potentially damaging activities.

9. In a given situation a mix of these components will be undertaken. When the mix
results
in poor enforcement, and/or the people involved are not won over, results are likely
to
be limited.
Environmental management can adopt three distinct stances:
1. preventive management – which aims to preclude adverse environmental
impacts;
2. reactive or punitive management – which aims at damage limitation or control;
3 compensatory management – mitigation of adverse impacts through trade-offs.
One example of the latter type of trade-off is to protect some habitats of
conservation
or aesthetic value, and to develop other localities.

12. If you can't fly, then RUN.
If you can't run, then WALK.
If you can't walk, then CRAWL.
But whatever you do,
YOU HAVE TO KEEP MOVING.
Martin Luther King, Jr. – Civil Rights Activist and Pastor

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