Concept of Environmental Management
The word ‘environment’ is used in different ways. We talk of the ‘home environment’, the ‘work environment’, the ‘social environment’. We use the word to describe our physical surroundings, made up of air, trees, grass.
Our concern must be for the world as a whole, it’s ‘air, water, land, natural resources, flora, fauna, humans, and their inter-relations.
By environmental management we mean keeping control of our activities so that we do what we can to conserve these physical resources and to avoid polluting them.
We can apply these controls in our life domestically, in what we buy and what we throw away, but it is usually in our work where the environmental impact of what we do is greatest.
Such has been the impact of industrial activity that resources are becoming depleted and environmental damage is increasing (ISO 14001, 2015).
Concept of Environmental Management Definition
Environmental Management has been defined by many Authors. Environmental management can be defined as being a goal or vision, an attempt to steer a process, the application of a set of tools, a more philosophical exercise seeking to identify and establish new outlooks, and much more. Individual environmental managers may have a problem solving, sectoral, local, regional or global focus.
They may be academics, regional or national decision makers and planners, non- governmental organization (NGO) staff, company executives, international civil servants, or all sorts of individuals or groups who are environmental stakeholders in some way using natural resources – herders, farmers, fishermen and so on (Barrow, 2005).
The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) in its document, ISO 14001 (2015) defined Environmental management as keeping control of our activities so that we do what we can to conserve these physical resources and to avoid polluting them.
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We can apply these controls in our life domestically, in what we buy and what we throw away, but it is usually in our work where the environmental impact of what we do is greatest.
Such has been the impact of industrial activity that resources are becoming depleted and environmental damage is increasing.
Environmental management can be said to be the active management of the impact of the society on the environment.
Environmental management is a subject that combines science, policy, and Socio-economic applications.
It primarily stresses on finding solution to practical problems that people face in cohabitation with nature, resource exploitation, and waste production.
In a purely anthropocentric sense, environmental management is all about dealing with the fundamental issue of how to innovate technology to evolve continuously while limiting the degree to which this process alters natural environment.
Thus, environmental management is closely linked with issues regarding sustainable economic growth, ensuring fair and equitable distribution of resources, and conserving natural resources for future generations.
Environmental management is a response to human actions considering the increasing seriousness and significance of today’s disastrous human impact on natural ecosystems.
It is comforting to know that with a smaller global population base and a less pervasive use of technology, the environment might be able to recuperate on its own from human misuse and abuse, but it is now widely recognized fact that in many cases positive intervention is necessary if the environment is to recover in view of the fact that people have bestowed more importance on economic growth than preservation of the natural ecosystems (NEC, 2011).
Going through the various definitions, it will be observed that Environmental management has two major aspects:
1. Socio-economic development, and
2. Stability of biosphere in general and stability of the various ecosystems in particular.
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