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An environmental policy forms the foundation of environmental improvements made for your business, as defined by senior management. It sets out key aims and principles. Having an environmental policy can provide significant benefits to your business. However, the benefits are not restricted simply to internal operations. By demonstrating commitment to environmental management, you can develop positive relations with external stakeholders, such as investors, insurers, customers, suppliers, regulators and the local community.
This in turn can lead to an improved corporate image and financial benefits, such as increased investment, customer sales and market share. It's important to bear in mind that these benefits are unlikely to be achieved if you just have an environmental policy in place. If you set up an environmental management system EMS this requires you to implement a program to systematically deliver your policy in a strategic way.
External certification of your EMS will help you demonstrate to customers, investors, regulators and other stakeholders that the environmental claims you make in your policy are credible, reliable and have been independently checked. If you don't choose to set up a formal EMS, it's a good idea to at least apply some of the steps to ensure your policy is effective. This can include assessing the environmental impact of your business, developing appropriate key performance indicators, setting objectives and targets and reviewing these regularly.
There is no standard format for writing an environmental policy, but to give it the best chance of success, it's important you plan it carefully.
For your policy to be successful you need to get buy-in from management , by emphasising the key benefits such as cost reduction, improved risk management and marketing. Once you have secured this commitment, it's a good idea to assess where your business currently stands in terms of environmental management.
This could include drawing up an environmental history of your business, its impact and the risks faced by it. You could also carry out a benchmarking exercise to establish how you compare against similar businesses.
The list of noncancer but chronic threats to health goes on; we can expect that policy makers will give more attention to such risks in the years to come, as the methods for studying them improve and concern about them grows. In line with the ISO standard they are developing environmental policies suitable for their organization. Joint implementation, the first mechanism, allowed countries to invest in lowering emissions in other countries that had ratified the Kyoto Protocol and, thus, had a reduction target to meet. Another major category of risk is harm to ecological resources. An extended policy acknowledges the fact that different groups of people rely on your business and outlines how you go about minimising your impact on the environment.
It's important to tailor your environmental policy to reflect your business and its culture. A good starting point is to collect and review examples of policies written by other businesses and select the format and style most appropriate to your own business. However, avoid copying someone else's policy. There is no standard content for an environmental policy, although policies normally contain the same themes. Bear in mind that your policy should be personal to your business, and as such reflect the activities, priorities and concerns most relevant to it.
Before you write your policy you should assess which aspects of your business affect the environment and what the potential impacts are. There are a number of techniques that you could use when carrying out the assessment. The content of your policy should be based on the results of your assessment, which should have identified the key issues that apply to your business. Additional issues relevant to your business, and which you may wish to address in your environmental policy, could include:. If your business is linked closely to key customers through the supply chain, obtain a copy of their environmental policy, so that your statements can reflect their requirements and needs.
Your policy should demonstrate commitment by senior management and is usually signed by the chairman or chief executive. Written by top management of the organization they document a commitment to continuous improvement and complying with legal and other requirements, such as the environmental policy objectives set by their governments.
The concept of environmental policy integration EPI refers to the process of integrating environmental objectives into non-environmental policy areas, such as energy, agriculture and transport, rather than leaving them to be pursued solely through purely environmental policy practices. This is oftentimes particularly challenging because of the need to reconcile global objectives and international rules with domestic needs and laws. Given the growing need for trained environmental practitioners, graduate schools throughout the world offer specialized professional degrees in environmental policy studies.
While there is not a standard curriculum , students typically take classes in policy analysis , environmental science , environmental law and politics , ecology , energy , and natural resource management. Graduates of these programs are employed by governments , international organizations , private sector , think tanks , universities , and so on. Due to the lack of standard nomenclature , institutions use varying designations to refer to academic degrees they award. However, the degrees typically fall in one of four broad categories: Sometimes, more specific names are used to reflect the focus of the academic program.
For example, the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey awards master of arts in international environmental policy MAIEP to emphasize the international orientation of the curriculum. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Concepts, Principles, and Practice. Environmental Policy in the European Union.
Environmental Policy in New Zealand. The Politics of Clean and Green. An International Journal , OECD Publications, 15— Environmental Policy in the European Union: Contexts, Actors and Policy Dynamics 3e. London and Sterling, VA. European Energy and Environmental Law Review. Public administration Public policy doctrine Public policy school Policy analysis Policy studies Regulation Public policy by country. Ecological anthropology Ecological economics Environmental anthropology Environmental economics Environmental communication Environmental history Environmental politics Environmental psychology Environmental sociology Human ecology Human geography Political ecology Regional science.
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Which agencies confront environmental problems, and how do they set priorities ? In Making Environmental Policy, Daniel Fiorino combines the hands-on. Making Environmental Policy [Daniel J. Fiorino] on bahana-line.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Who speaks for the trees, the water, the soil, and the air.
Retrieved from " https: Such regulative systems, like the Clean Water and Clean Air acts in the United States, succeeded in effectively addressing point sources i. Nevertheless, some environmental problems persisted, often because of the many nonpoint diffuse sources of pollution, such as exhaust from private automobiles and pesticide and fertilizer runoff from small farms, that contributed to air and water pollution. Individually, those small sources were not harmful, but the accumulation of their pollution exceeded the regulative minimum norms for environmental quality.
Also, the increasing complexity of chains of cause and effect contributed to persistent problems. In the s the effects of acid rain showed that the causes of environmental pollution could be separated geographically from its effects. From the late s, sustainable development — i. With nature and natural resources considered as economic drivers, environmental policy making was no longer the exclusive domain of government.
Instead, private industry and nongovernmental organizations assumed greater responsibility for the environment. Also, the concept emphasized that individual people and their communities play a key role in the effective implementation of policies. Over the years, a variety of principles have been developed to help policy makers. Such straightforward guiding principles do not work in all situations. For example, some environmental challenges, such as global warming , illuminate the need to view Earth as an ecosystem consisting of various subsystems, which, once disrupted, can lead to rapid changes that are beyond human control.
Getting polluters to pay or the sudden adoption of the precautionary principle by all countries would not necessarily roll back the damage already imparted to the biosphere, though it would stop future damage from occurring. Since the early s, environmental policies have made a shift from end-of-pipe solutions to prevention and control.
Such solutions rely on the mitigation of negative effects. In addition, if a negative effect was unavoidable, it could be compensated for by investing in nature in other places than where the damage was caused, for example. A third solution, which develops policies that focus on adapting the living environment to the change, is also possible.
One such example is in Curitiba , Brazil, a city where some districts flood each year. The residents of flood-prone districts were relocated to higher and dryer places, and their former living areas were transformed into parks that could be flooded without disrupting city life.
Numerous instruments have been developed to influence the behaviour of actors who contribute to environmental problems. Traditionally, public policy theories have focused on regulation , financial incentives, and information as the tools of government. However, new policy instruments such as performance requirements and tradable permits have been used. Regulation is used to impose minimum requirements for environmental quality. Such interventions aim to encourage or discourage specific activities and their effects, involving particular emissions, particular inputs into the environment such as specific hazardous substances , ambient concentrations of chemicals, risks and damages, and exposure.
Often, permits have to be acquired for those activities, and the permits have to be renewed periodically. In many cases, local and regional governments are the issuing and controlling authorities. However, more-specialized or potentially hazardous activities, such as industrial plants treating dangerous chemical substances or nuclear power stations using radioactive fuel rods, are more likely to be controlled by a federal or national authority.
Regulation is an effective means to prescribe and control behaviour. Detailed environmental regulations have resulted in a considerable improvement in the quality of air, water, and land since the early s. The strengths of regulation are that it is generally binding—it includes all actors who want to undertake an activity described in the regulation—and it treats them in the same framework.
Regulations are also rigid: That can be considered as a strength, since rigidity ensures that regulations will not change too suddenly. However, rigidity can also be considered a weakness, because it slows down innovation , as actors seek to stay within the letter of the law rather than creating new technologies, such as more-efficient emission scrubbers on smokestacks that would remove more pollution than what the regulation mandates.
When regulations demand standards that are difficult or impossible to meet—because of a lack of knowledge, skills, or finances on the part of the actors or mismanagement by policymakers—regulations will not be effective. One common improvement in environmental regulation made since the s has been the development of performance requirements, which allow actors to determine their own course of action to meet the standard. For example, they are not required to purchase a particular piece of equipment to meet an emissions standard.
They can do it another way, such as developing a technology or process that reduces emissions. The advantage of performance requirements is that actors addressed by the regulation are encouraged to innovate in order to meet the requirements. Despite that advantage, performance requirements cannot keep actors who lack incentives from achieving more than the minimum requirements. Governments can decide to stimulate behavioral change by giving positive or negative financial incentives—for example, through subsidies , tax discounts, or fines and levies.
Such incentives can play an important role in boosting innovation and in the diffusion and adoption of innovations. For example, in Germany the widespread subsidizing of solar energy systems for private homeowners increased the large-scale adoption of photovoltaic PV panels. Financial incentives or disincentives can also stimulate professional actors to change. A potential drawback of financial incentives is that they distort the market. When not used for a limited period, they can make receivers dependent upon the subsidy.