Environmental Management: Principles and practice

particular objectives (Royston, 1978b).
♦ Environmental management—a generic description of a process
undertaken by systems-oriented professionals with a natural science,
social science, or less commonly, an engineering, law, or design
background, tackling problems of the human-altered environment on an
interdisciplinary basis from a quantitative and/or futuristic viewpoint
(Dorney, 1989:15).

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FIGURE 1.1 A typical scheme of practice adopted for environmental management
Note: Increasingly, stages 1, 2 and 3 are influenced by broad strategic policies, and are
accountable to public scrutiny (as is stage 5). Ideally, lessons learnt at every stage should be
passed on to improve future environmental management—the evaluation of stages 4 and 5 is
especially valuable for future management. At stage 1 the public or a developer may not have
a clear idea of needs or goals, so the environmental manager may need to establish these.

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INTRODUCTION
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must somehow, as Henderson (1981a) advised, ‘think globally, act locally’ —and
adopt a long-term outlook. Figure 1.1 suggests how environmental management is
typically conducted.
Problems and opportunities
Often considerable effort and much money is expended treating symptoms of a
problem but not the causes, which may be difficult to identify and lie well away (in
space or time), along a chain of causation. The risk of making this sort of mistake
should be reduced by the adoption of a careful approach. Even if such an approach
can be used, there is a risk that management will be based on ‘snapshot’ views, so it
is important to use broad-view, long-term and, if possible, gap-free monitoring and
auditing to try to reduce this risk (Born and Sonzogni, 1995).
Environmental management will need to modify the ethics of individuals,
groups and societies to achieve its goals. There are three main approaches:
1
Advisory
♦
through education;
♦
through demonstration (e.g. model farms or factories);
♦
through the media (overt or covert approaches—the latter includes
‘messages’ incorporated in entertainment);
♦
through advice (leaflets, drop-in shops, helplines, etc.).
2
Economic or fiscal
♦
through taxation (‘green’ taxes);
♦
through grants, loans, aid;
♦
through subsidies;
♦
through quotas or trade agreements.
3
Regulatory
♦
through standards;
♦
through restrictions and monitoring;
♦
through licensing;
♦
through zoning (restricting activities to a given area).
One problem faced by environmental managers is that the goal of sustainable
development is not fully formed and its fundamental concepts are still debated.
Sustainable development, like environmental management, is not easily defined (see
Box 1.2). The concept, although it had appeared in the 1970s, was widely disseminated
in the early 1980s by the World Conservation Strategy (IUCN, UNEP and WWF,
1980), which called for the maintenance of essential ecological processes; the
preservation of biodiversity; and sustainable use of species and ecosystems. The
Brundtland Report, Our Common Future (World Commission on Environment and
Development, 1987), placed it on the world’s political agenda and helped rekindle

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