Environmental Management: Principles and practice

Are there areas of the world particularly prone to environmental
problems?
Given long enough, even the safest area could be subjected to natural or
anthropogenic problems. Environmental managers must be alert for situations where
risk and likely severity of problems may be altered by human activity—for example,
land may be sensitized to drought or soil erosion by misuse. The effects of storms
can be magnified if people remove vegetation cover from watersheds or coastal
land. Development may drive people, or they may be attracted into areas where
they trigger natural processes to cause environmental problems. People often evolve
strategies of environmental use—nomadic grazing, shifting cultivation, etc. —which
minimize environmental problems and risks to their well-being, but these strategies
may break down as a result of development. Ideally, environmental management
would monitor for such changes. However, there is a limit to resources, so such
wide-ranging study is seldom possible. The solution may be for international
agencies to monitor.
Particularly in developed countries people are becoming more dependent on
technology, which increases their vulnerability, manifest in two ways: (1) hazards
posed by malfunction; (2) hazards posed by system breakdown, through
mismanagement, accident, obsolescence, civil unrest or war. The way to reduce this
vulnerability is to have better regulations and controls to ensure safe equipment and
fail-safe systems. Insurance companies and public opinion may help provide such
safeguards. However, the poor often have to make do with poor inspection, weak
regulations and inadequate technology—disasters like the Bhopal pollution accident
result (Barrow, 1995a:270). Generally the rich can buy their way out of risk.

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DIFFICULT SITUATIONS
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Countries which have complex, interlocking technology and economics are
vulnerable. Complex systems are easily disrupted and need skilled specialists to
maintain them. They are difficult to run in times of stress and may be a challenge to
salvage. Natural disasters or terrorism could have marked effects on complex computer
systems needed by government and banking; a poor country may have few difficulties
if it is still using robust card-indexes, decentralized services, etc. There are currently
fears that the millennium bug or some computer virus could wreak havoc with
electronic systems. If so, it may prompt governments not to rely so much on vulnerable
and centralized systems.