Issues For Debate In Environmental Management

Can New Business Policies Save the Environment?

Though the scientific community largely agrees that climate change is underway, debates about this issue remain fiercely polarized. These conversations have become a rhetorical contest, one where opposing sides try to achieve victory through playing on fear, distrust, and intolerance. At its heart, this split no longer concerns carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, or climate modeling; rather, it is the product of contrasting, deeply entrenched worldviews. This brief examines what causes people to reject or accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Synthesizing evidence from sociology, psychology, and political science, Andrew J. Hoffman lays bare the opposing cultural lenses through which science is interpreted. He then extracts lessons from major cultural shifts in the past to engender a better understanding of the problem and motivate the public to take action. How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate makes a powerful case for a more scientifically literate public, a more socially engaged scientific community, and a more thoughtful mode of public discourse.

Most controversies in environmental policy are rooted in clashes of values involving science and technology versus humanism, economic efficiency versus humanism, the role of nature in society and the role of government in society. The author discusses how America makes environmental policy - at the Federal and State levels as well as their enforcement agencies designed to protect and regulate at the same time. Portney examines legislation, public opinion, implementation or non-implementation relative to the debates over water, air and soil management.

Corporate Environmental Management 3 examines the complex yet crucial issues faced when we make a genuine commitment to move towards sustainable development. It tackles the nature of the international economic order and the efficacy of free trade and globalization in response to the growing recognition that businesses and organizations must now effect real change to ensure a sustainable future. It analyses strategies for managers, researchers, academics and students to achieve operations consistent with this goal and provides accounts of best practice, offering substantial references to leading articles in the field. With welcome clarity of thought and expression, analysis is made of the structural, as well as cultural, adaptations demanded of businesses in changing socioeconomic circumstances. Can an ethic be derived from the concept of sustainable development to be applied to the practice of business? Will the globalization of economic activity have a detrimental and decisive effect on the ability of business to bring about the vital progress needed? What are the implications of postmodern social theory, with its emphasis on the uncertainty of value and commitment, for corporations attempting to effect change? This third book in the comprehensive and authoritative Corporate Environmental Management series provides an ideal introduction to the main practical and theoretical issues for those new to the subject, whilst those familiar with the series will find it a thoughtful and incisive development of the debate. Richard Welford is Professor of Corporate Environmental Management at the University of Huddersfield, professor of Sustainable Management at the Norwegian School of Management and a Director of ERP Environment. Originally published in 2000

Over the past decade, the greening of industry has become both an issue in scientific and political debate and a generic substantive development in industry itself. This study is the product of an international collaborative research project investigating exemplary cases of successful environmental management in European companies in Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, and Latvia with the aim of discovering the reasons and dynamics underlying them and the role environmental policy did and could play. Providing the background and context of the research project, the nine case studies concern various companies of different sizes and from different industrial branches and describe the social processes leading to substantive environmental achievements and corresponding environmental management systems. This study also evaluates the success stories in a comparative empirical, as well as theoretical, perspective with an environmental policy orientation. Case studies examine the role of a company's internal and external determinants, explaining successful corporate environmental management on the micro-level.

In the past quarter century, environmental management has increasingly become a concern of governments. More recently, the traditional split between developers and conservationists has begun to break down. Conceptions of what is economically and technologically practical, ecologically necessary, and politically feasible are rapidly changing. This report discusses the implications of five paradigms of environmental management in development. The author notes that the remedial legalistic approach of environmental management is breaking down. Instead, interest in the more economically integrated approach of resource management has recently taken hold. Several interdependent forces indicate that improving the economic management of pollution and resources may be a necessary but insufficient measure to create the conditions for sustainable development. The perception of tradeoffs between development and environmental quality persists in the present debate, but its necessity is greatly exaggerated, according to this paper. Finally, it is noted that paradigms may be impervious to evidence, and institutions and societies too difficult to change. Whether, when and how these issues are resolved may be modern civilization's most significant test.

Climate change has an impact on the ability of transboundary water management institutions to deliver on their respective mandates. The starting point for this book is that actors within transboundary water management institutions develop responses to the climate change debate, as distinct from the physical phenomenon of climate change. Actors respond to this debate broadly in three distinct ways – adapt, resist (as in avoiding the issue) and subvert (as in using the debate to fulfil their own agenda). The book charts approaches which have been taken over the past two decades to promote more effective water management institutions, covering issues of conflict, cooperation, power and law. A new framework for a better understanding of the interaction between transboundary water management institutional resilience and global change is developed through analysis of the way these institutions respond to the climate change debate. This framework is applied to six river case studies from Africa, Asia and the Middle East (Ganges-Brahmaputra, Jordan, Mekong, Niger, Nile, Orange-Senqu) from which learning conclusions and policy recommendations are developed.

Environmental Management, with few exceptions, is not taught in colleges, universities, technical and management institutions. The result is that the students of these institutions lack knowledge and sensitisation to environmental issues. They lack the awareness of environmental consequences of human actions. To fill this void, Environmental Management is timely. The book provides background material to various environmental problems. It surveys a range of topics from sustainable development and ecological imperatives to strategies for managing environmental issues. The problem of pollution, waste management, biological diversity and forest management have been analysed in the light of laws and international conventions and treaties. The book brings out the realities about the damage being inflicted on the environment and our exploitive attitude to nature. It concludes with discussion and debate about values in nature and touches upon the subject of metamorphosis of the whole trajectory of attitudes in modern societies.