Varying Approaches to Environmental Management

The term EMS or Environmental Management System, is used very loosely and many of these approaches do not include a system. All EMS programs start with some form of environmental audit and this is an essential first step but knowing what is wrong and doing something about it are two different things.

There is no reason why, given appropriate tools and guidance, businesses should not initially audit their environmental impacts themselves. They know more about their business than anyone else but they do need to open their eyes to practices they had never realised pose an environmental risk.

They need to work through a very systematic approach and do this with their eyes open. Once they have an audit in place and understand the issues, an audit alone is not effective – it only identifies problems.

The next step is to develop an environmental management plan (EMP), which hopefully has been based on analysing risks identified by the audit findings. An environmental management plan still does not necessarily lead to good environmental management because there is no feedback loop. It is so easy to leave things until tomorrow, which never comes. There is an internationally recognised approach to Risk Analysis described in AS/NZS 4360: 2004 and this is the proper approach to follow.

Some people grab a “risk” out of the air and decide that it is a low risk activity and the other end of this spectrum is demonstrated by some scientists deciding that determining environmental risk for an industry is a wonderful opportunity to apply for research funding.

The middle approach, based on a realistic assessment of both likelihood and consequence within individual businesses is the approach that is internationally recognised. The difficulty with an industry wide approach is that the actual likelihood and consequence differ widely between businesses even within the same industry