Environmental Management: Principles and practice

Sustainable development and coping with global
environmental change
One of the key goals for environmental management is to achieve sustainable
development. Although the concept of sustainable development is increasingly
dominating environmental management, it still needs clarification, and tried and
tested practical strategies are scarce (Carley and Christie, 1992; Barrow, 1995). The
literature is choked with cliché and wishful thinking about paradigm shifts to a
sustainable society, and the need for eco-ethics, but little of this is of practical value
for the near future. Academic publications overflow with management, decision-
making and planning proposals, only a fraction of which are likely to be adopted by
practitioners—what is needed are practical solutions.
To improve environmental care and make a transition to sustainable
development more likely will demand a change from current reliance on GNP and
GDP as measures of national performance, to something more green (Henderson,
1994) (see state-of-the-environment accounts in chapter 4). Agenda 21 signatories

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committed themselves to improving national accounting to include environmental
costs, benefits and values. Environmental management approaches need to be
developed and tuned for practical use: more effort could be spent on this. One such
study, by Auty (1995: 262–271), made a comparison between strong green and weak
green approaches to environmental management.
Environmental management makes decisions which affect future generations
as well as the present generation. There is a need for better rules and ethics to guide
environmental managers: what trade-offs between present and future are acceptable;
should as little as possible be done to reduce options for those in the future (a part of
the concept of sustainable development)? Cooper and Palmer (1992:135–146) have
examined the ethics of likely future environmental challenges.