The Importance of Environmental Management in Today's Society

The Importance of Environmental Management in Today's Society

Introduction

Environmental management is the management of the impact and interaction of human societies on the environment. The objective of environmental resources management is to make sure protection and maintenance of ecosystem services for future human generations, and maintenance of ecosystem integrity as well by means of considering ecological, economic, and ethical variables. Environmental management endeavors to recognize elements influenced by conflicts that originate while fulfilling needs and protection of resources. Therefore, it is associated with environmental sustainability and protection. Environmental resource management can be viewed from a variety of perspectives.

Environmental resource management comprises the management of all biophysical environmental components: both living and non-living (i.e., biotic and abiotic). This is because of the interrelated relationships network between all living species and their environments. The environment also includes the associations of the human environment, for instance the economic, cultural and social environment with the biophysical environment. The social, economical, ethical, and technological aspects of environmental resource management are very essential.

All our daily operations have an environmental impact and every person is responsible to measure and manage environmental impact. The role of environmental management is one of the most rapidly changing areas of management. Its focus has shifted from reacting to crises and solving problems to complying with regulations. The next stage of environmental management goes beyond compliance to pollution prevention. Compliance with regulatory requirements, remediation and sustainability planning highly impacts business decisions and operational issues of corporate. This paper aims to explore the public apathy to public concern; local, national and international interests towards environmental resources management, regulatory compliance to continual improvement, and environmental costs to competitive advantages.

Background

The environmental management refers to the management practices of an entity to take into account the environmental impact of its activities, to evaluate their impacts and to reduce adverse effects. The agenda of environmental management, as lately as a decade ago, was still considered as a fringe issue by many organizations. Nevertheless, a noticeable negative effect has been observed in recent years on the world's climate because of the increased natural resource use; therefore, lately the green agenda is increasingly well-recognized.

In accordance with the report of Chartered Management Institute (2009) “Lean and Green : Leadership for a low-carbon future”, more than 80 per cent of managers consider usage of energy as a substantial matter to their business - and approximately two thirds of managers settle on the fact that, in the next three years, carbon management will increasingly become important. Many benefits can be brought by good environmental management including enhanced reputational and environmental risk management; fulfilling expectations of stakeholder of what makes up a responsible, well-run business; and assurance of compliance with relevant codes, regulations and environmental laws (www.managers.org.uk). Thus, the motivations of a company for environmental management can be of several types: regulatory compliance, improve corporate image, improve relations with neighbors (for polluting companies), to save money, get environmental certification demanded by customers of the company ...