The development of strategies to allocate and conserve resources, with the ultimate goal of regulating the impact of human activities on the surrounding environment. “Environment” here usually means the natural surroundings, both living and inanimate, of human lives and activities. However, it can also mean the artificial landscape of cities, or occasionally even the conceptual field of the noosphere, the realm of communicating human minds.
Environmental management is a mixture of science, policy, and socioeconomic applications. It focuses on the solution of the practical problems that humans encounter in cohabitation with nature, exploitation of resources, and production of waste. In a purely anthropocentric sense, the central problem is how to permit technology to evolve continuously while limiting the degree to which this process alters natural ecosystems. Environmental management is thus intimately intertwined with questions regarding economic growth, equitable distribution of consumable goods, and conserving resources for future generations. Environmental managers fall within a broad spectrum, from those who would limit human interference in nature to those who would increase it in order to guide natural processes along benign paths. Participants in the process of environmental management fall into seven main groups: (1) governmental organizations at the local, regional, national, and international levels, including world bodies such as the United Nations Environment Programme and the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development; (2) research institutions, such as universities, academies, and national laboratories; (3) bodies charged with the enforcement of regulations, such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; (4) businesses of all sizes and multinational corporations; (5) international financial institutions, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund; (6) environmental nongovernmental organizations, such as the World Wildlife Fund for Nature; and (7) representatives of the users of the environment, including tribes, fishermen, and hunters. The agents of environmental management include foresters, soil conservationists, policy-makers, engineers, and resource planners.
Some common themes of environmental management are bilateral and multilateral environmental treaties; design and use of decision-support systems; environmental policy formulation, enactment, and policing of compliance; estimation, analysis, and management of environmental risk; management of recreation and tourism; natural resource evaluation and conservation; positive environmental economics; promotion of positive environmental values by education, debate, and information dissemination; and strategies for the rehabilitation of damaged environments.
The need to improve management of the environment has given rise to several new techniques. There is environmental impact analysis, which was first formulated in California and is codified in the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Through the environmental impact statement, it prescribes the investigatory and remedial measures that must be taken in order to mitigate the adverse effects of new development. It is intended to act in favor of both prudent conservation and participatory democracy. Another technique is environmental auditing, which uses the model of the financial audit to examine the processes and outcomes of environmental impacts. It requires value judgments, which are usually set by public preference, ideology, and policy, to define what are regarded as acceptable outcomes. Audits use techniques such as life-cycle analysis and environmental burden analysis to assess the impact of, for example, manufacturing processes that consume resources and create waste.
