Environmental Management: Principles and practice

Environmental risk management
Environmental risk management incorporates a range of approaches (including risk
assessment, discussed later in this chapter) to:
♦
estimate risk;
♦
evaluate risk;
♦
respond to risk.
It deals with multidimensional risks (often involving interrelated physical and social
impacts) and demands political judgement to improve the chances of optimum decision
making (O’Riordan, 1979; Pollard et al., 1995). There have been calls for these
approaches to become more holistic (Harvey et al., 1995), and some already overlap
with or are combined together in eco-auditing. There is growing interest in risks
associated with global environmental change, including: biospheric catastrophe
(unstoppable shift to conditions that threaten human and other life); climatic perturbation
(natural or human-induced which threatens the well-being of people and wildlife);
reduced provision of basic needs (threats to sustained production of food, access to
adequate water, energy, etc.); and pollution (O’Riordan and Rayner, 1991).
Environmental risk management and most of the approaches discussed in this
chapter are imprecise, partly because the world is complex; a common cliché is that
‘everything in the environment is connected to everything else’. The media often
refer to the ‘butterfly effect’ (a concept from chaos theory, implying that a trivial
event can lead to a vast cascade of changes that are impossible to predict accurately).
Since the 1960s there has been a shift towards more appropriate development, and
the right to damage the environment and people in the name of ‘progress’ is
questioned. There is increased awareness that technology and biotechnology can
pose threats and there is growing interest in sustainable development. This chapter

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looks at the approaches developed to identify and avoid problems or missed
opportunities. In addition to warning of impacts, risks and hazards, some of these
approaches can help make planning and management more accountable to the public,
and may encourage more careful decision making. They are often not the quantitative
scientific approaches they seem; rather, they are ordered but subjective methods for
improving judgement (Fairweather, 1993:10).