Environmental Management Overview

Definition and Scope of Environmental Management

• Environmental management is the process of organizing, planning, controlling, and leading resources to achieve organizational environmental goals
• Key aspects include planning, organizing, leading, and controlling
• Environmental management is a broad field
• Includes the natural environment, built environment, and the relationship between them (interdependence)
• Survival on Earth depends on proper environmental management
• Environmental management is concerned with human-environment interactions, to protect and enhance human health and welfare, and environmental quality.
• It's a system of administrative functions aiming to develop, implement, and monitor environmental strategies

What is Environment?

• Environment encompasses all living (biotic) and non-living (abiotic) elements affecting human life
• Biotic elements include animals, plants, forests, fisheries, and birds
• Abiotic elements include water, land, sunlight, rocks, and air
• Environment is the sum total of all elements and their effects on human life

Overview: Plan versus Management

• A plan is a structured outline of actions designed to achieve a goal
• Key characteristics of a plan include goal-orientation, structure, resource-based considerations, and a timeframe for completion
• Management is the process of organizing, planning, controlling, and leading resources to achieve organizational objectives. It coordinates efforts to ensure efficient and effective operations
• Key aspects of management include planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. Planning develops and implements plans for goals, organizing structures resources and assigns responsibilities, leading motivates and inspires staff, and controlling monitors performance, evaluates results, and adjusts as needed

Introduction

• Environmental studies is an interdisciplinary field integrating life, physical, and earth sciences to address environmental problems and implement science-based solutions
• It's a broad field encompassing natural, built, and the relationship between them.
• Human survival depends on the proper management of the environment

Context: Challenges Facing Environmental Management

• The ecological crisis presents a significant challenge to environmental management, stemming from various factors, including complexity, uncertainties, shortcomings in baseline data, basic science, and increasing prevalence of unnatural disasters
• Human influence has affected most environments, complexity is high and thus predicting the precise outcome to issues is challenging
• Human impact results in a need for nuanced, long term considerations for sustainability management.
• Gaps in baseline ecological knowledge exist, and sometimes are only realized once the impact is experienced
• Uncertainty is an inherent part of environmental management. Scientific knowledge is subject to continual revision and reinterpretation

Political context of environmental management

• Neoliberalism includes policies like eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers, and reducing state influence in economies.
• Environmental governance involves developing and implementing policy, rules, and norms that govern human behavior concerning decisions, how decisions are made, and how the public and stakeholders can participate in those decisions.

Scope of Environmental Management

• Awareness regarding environmental problems and their management started in the 1970s with various people movements (Greenpeace, Chipko, etc.). Scientific advancements and technologies provided tools for data collection and analysis, aiding problem-solving.
• Broader scope includes the identification of problems, resource exploitation and utilization restrictions, the regeneration of degraded environments, the control of environmental pollution and gradation, the reduction of extreme event impacts, optimal utilization of resources, and assessing impacts of projects and activities on the environment
• Critical areas to environmental management include increasing population, health services, pollutant treatment, pollution levels, development of clean energy sources (wind, solar, biomass), solid waste utilization, biodiversity conservation, and public awareness.

Components of Environmental Management

• Environmental management is based on five fundamental aspects: environmental perception and public awareness (sources and level of awareness and role in planning and management), environmental education, and training; resource management (classification, survey, evaluation, and preservation/conservation of resources), the control of environmental degradation, and environmental impact assessment. Assessment/appraisal of existing environmental conditions, probable impacts of proposed projects, review of technology and improvement.