Environmental Management
Contemporary environmental management has several roots. After the Second World War, an interest emerged in new ecology as well as managerial sciences. In the 1960s and 1970s, environmentalism became a social phenomenon and ecological awareness increased. Throughout the 1980s, concerns about sustainability grew with the release of the 1987 Brundtland Commission's landmark report titled, Our Common Future (for more information see the introduction).
Why was (and is) Environmental Management Needed?
Dorney (1989) identifies several reasons. These include the need for: gaining information from a systems perspective, assessing the ecological consequences from human activities, monitoring ecological conditions, uptake and adapting ‘appropriate’ technology, connecting human and natural systems, and undertaking applied research. While identified almost 30 years ago, these reasons remain pertinent today. However, their urgency is intensified by the extent of impacts and influences by humans.Environmental management aims to address the multiple values held by humans about the environment. This is an extremely difficult mandate as strong tensions are evident when attempting to reconcile environmental protection, economic development and human well-being. Environmental management is thus defined as “a process concerned with human-environment interactions, and seeks to identify: what is environmentally desirable; what are the physical, economic, social and technological constraints to achieving that; and what are the most feasible options” (Barrow, 2006, p.5).
The Process of Environmental Management
The process of environmental management has been conceptualized in many ways. The figure below illustrates how environmental management generally unfolds in practice. The process begins with identifying needs/goals, defining the problem(s), and determining the appropriate actions. As mentioned above, environmental management is essentially about values and perceptions held by concerned individuals (often referred to as stakeholders), and these aspects are often contested. Planning is the foundation for other functions of management (e.g. organizing, influencing, controlling) and ultimately determines how to achieve the goal(s) (Certo, Appelbaum and Shapiro, 1993).Environmental management plans are the result of this step in the process and express what will be done and by whom to achieve the goal(s). Implementation involves putting the appropriate actions in place, as articulated in the environmental management plan. Implementation of environmental management often encompasses projects as well as programs. Monitoring and evaluating are essential and ongoing as they provide feedback on effectiveness of the actions (is the action having the intended result?). This feedback is utilized on an ongoing basis to make adjustments to implementation. Ultimately, it also provides information for evaluating success in relation to the initial goal(s). It is helpful to thus consider environmental management as an ongoing and iterative process.
Principles guiding the practice of environmental management continue to change. These changes reflect realizations of limited successes, new understanding about systems, and critiques of conventional approaches. Natural resources and environmental management were approached in a ‘command-and-control’ fashion, with the state (government) endeavoring to solve problems through top-down regulations. While considerable success was made with this approach to solve some types of environmental challenges, it had unintended consequences (Holling and Meffe, 1996 refer to this result as ‘the pathology of natural resource management’) and didn’t work well to address challenges that were complex and contested. Approaches to environmental management have thus developed considerably and draw attention to principles associated with complex adaptive systems, integration, collaboration and learning.
Applications of Environmental Management
The process of environmental management is applied in a wide variety of situations. While each situation has unique considerations, the intent is the same – trying to reach the environmental-related goals of the entity. Three examples of some of the many applications of environmental management follow.
- Businesses and other types of organizations often have an environmental management system (EMS). An EMS is “… a management structure that allows an organization to assess and control the environmental impact of its activities, products or services” (Standards Council of Canada, 2017, online). Standards of practice are important for organizations. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has a family of standards (ISO 14000) addressing environmental management, with ISO 14001 being recently revised.
- Degradation and impairment of ecological systems are major concerns of environmental management. Restoring these systems is the goal of ecological restoration. Ecological restoration is “the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed” (Clewell & Aronson, 2013, p.3). Ecological restoration occurs in both terrestrial and aquatic systems.
- In developing countries, environmental management often incorporates addressing socioeconomic challenges (e.g. poverty, food and water security) as well, to create buy-in from communities and governments. The video below illustrates how two villages in India manage dryland systems to promote the economic well-being of the rural poor as well as better land-use management to prevent further environmental degradation and desertification.
These examples show how the environment can be brought into planning, whether the focus is primarily ecological (as in the ecological restoration work) or not (as in the ISO standards). These diverse examples, as well as the examples from the planning section show the importance of consideration of the environment in our social, economic and environmental activities.
