The ISO 14000 family of
standards provides practical tools for companies and organizations of all kinds
looking to manage their environmental responsibilities.
ISO 14001:2015 and its supporting
standards such as ISO 14006:2011 focus on environmental systems to achieve
this. The other standards in the family focus on specific approaches such as
audits, communications, labelling and life cycle analysis, as well as
environmental challenges such as climate change.
As the principal user of nature,
humanity is responsible for ensuring that its environmental impacts are benign
rather than catastrophic. Environmental Management presents the work of
academic researchers and professionals outside universities, including those in
business, government, research establishments, and public interest groups,
presenting a wide spectrum of viewpoints and approaches.
Environmental management is not easy to define. As
Barrow (2005) has acknowledged, it can refer to a goal or vision, to attempts
to steer a process, to the application of a set of tools, to a philosophical
exercise seeking to establish new perspectives towards the environment and
human societies, and to much more besides. Environmental managers are a diverse
group of people including academics, policy-makers, non-governmental
organisation (NGO) workers, company employees, civil servants and a wide range
of individuals or groups who make decisions about the use of natural resources
(such as fishers, farmers and pastoralists). Indeed, environmental management
involves all people to some extent because all human activities ultimately have
some sort of environmental impact. However, some individuals are more directly
involved with resource use, and some special interest groups are particularly
concerned with resource exploitation and with issues related to pollution.
Environmental management therefore involves many stakeholders and requires a
multidisciplinary perspective. It involves many spatial scales, ranging from
the local to the global. It also involves many, diverse goals, including the
desires to control the direction and pace of development, to optimise resource
use, to minimise environmental degradation and to avoid environmental disaster.
Environmental management may be practised by individuals and groups holding
conflicting - and even directly opposing - views, as may be the case when
environmental managers employed by large multinational corporations come into
conflict with environmental managers representing voluntary organisations.
A focus on decision-making
In general, however, environmental management is
concerned with the understanding of the structure and function of the earth
system, as well as of the ways in which humans relate to their environment.
Environmental management is therefore concerned with the description and
monitoring of environmental changes, with predicting future changes and with
attempts to maximise human benefit and to minimise environmental degradation
due to human activities. Yet, characteristically, environmental management is
about decision-making - and it is especially concerned with the process of
decision-making in relation to the use of natural resources, the pollution of
habitats and the modification of ecosystems. Fundamentally, then, environmental
management is a political activity because those decisions - about resources,
pollution and ecosystems - are never neutral or objective; on the contrary,
they are value laden and they reflect the exercise of power by particular
groups over others. Moreover, in general, it is naïve to conceive of
environmental management as being about simply 'the management of the
environment' in the sense of humans manipulating and controlling the components
and processes of the earth system. Of course, humans do exert such influences
on the earth system; but it is a fallacy to think that humans 'manage', for
instance, populations of humpback whales. Instead, it is more accurate to
suggest that humans may be able to make some progress towards managing human
impacts on humpback whales. Ultimately, then, environmental management is more
concerned with the management of human activities and their impacts than with
the management of the natural environment per se.
Influencing the course of
development
Nevertheless, some types of activity are common to
environmental managers. Environmental managers attempt deliberately to steer the process of development
in order to take advantage of opportunities; they attempt to ensure that
critical environmental limits are not exceeded; they work to reduce and
mitigate environmental issues; and they are concerned with increasing the
adaptability and resilience of human societies in the face of environmental
change, variability, unpredictability and hazards. From this point of view,
environmental management may be defined as the system that anticipates and
avoids, or solves, environmental and resource conservation issues. From another
point of view, environmental management may be defined as a process concerned
with human-environment interactions which seeks to identify:
- what
are environmentally desirable outcomes
- what
are the physical, economic, social, cultural, political and technological
constraints to achieving those outcomes
- what
are the most feasible options for achieving those outcomes
Indeed, in many parts of the world (and arguably
worldwide), environmental management is intimately linked with pressing issues
of justice and even of survival. A further definition might suggest that
environmental management is concerned with meeting and improving provision for
human needs and demands on a sustainable basis with minimal damage to natural
habitats and ecosystems. Thus the concept of environmental management is
closely related to another important (and problematic) concept: that of
sustainable development.
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