Environmental Management in Organizations

The IEMA Handbook

John Brady, Alison Ebbage, Ruth Lunn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781849710626
• eBook ISBN: 9781135072452
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

Environmental issues can present some daunting operational concerns for all types of organization, whether in the private, public and voluntary sectors. Managing them requires environmental professionals with a working knowledge of the rapidly developing body of regulatory measures.

This new edition of Environmental Management in Organizations provides all the management tools, performance measures and communication strategies that organizations need to manage their environmental responsibilities effectively. Leading experts on each topic provide focused explanations and clear practical guidance, as well as setting out the context and the key environmental and management drivers.

This edition significantly updates the original handbook to take account of developments in the environmental agenda, including new dedicated chapters on climate change, energy, transport, biodiversity and chemicals. Published with IEMA.

Part 1 The Environmental Context

DOI: 10.4324/9780203597675-1

Chapter 1.1 The Earth’s Natural Systems

Dr Mark Everard

DOI: 10.4324/9780203597675-2

Within two years of the now famous 1987 ‘Brundtland’ definition of sustainable development, in excess of 140 alternative definitions were in use to define ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’. This figure had risen to over 300 by 2007. One might therefore assume that sustainability and sustainable development are largely arbitrary concepts. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Human needs, present and future, are fully dependent upon the supportive ecosystems of planet Earth that work in definite ways circumscribed by the fixed and unyielding ‘rules’ of natural law. These laws in turn drive nature’s supportive cycles, which represent a finite pool of generally renewable resources that are nevertheless vulnerable to overuse, contamination or inequitable exploitation. Stray outside of natural limits and these supportive ecosystems are degraded on local to global scales. This, in turn, diminishes their capacities to support all of life, including human well-being, security, economic activities and future potential.

The origins of the Earth

Best estimates place planet Earth at around 4.54 billion years old, condensed from the hot gases and dust that were the primary constituents of our solar system. Virtually all of the matter comprising the early Earth is still with us today. Sedimentation, precipitation and other processes began to settle out heavier fractions from this homogenous amalgam as the Earth cooled and took more solid form, though life was not yet possible on this proto-planet. However, as cooling, sorting and solidifying progressed over geological timescales, conditions were at last possible for the origins of biological life.

Life itself put in its evolutionary debut some 3.85 billion years ago. All organisms make their living through reacting with chemicals in their environment, inevitably changing the chemistry of the environment in which they occur. The arrival of living things instigated a new phase in Earth’s evolution. They increased the rate at which some types of matter became ‘locked away’ into the Earth’s crust (also known as the lithosphere) and were therefore progressively sequestered from the biosphere (the living component of the planet comprising land, water and the atmosphere). Physico-chemical mineralization processes were augmented and accelerated by biologically mediated biomineralization processes, ‘locking away’ substances like heavy metals and phosphorus, with carbon too sequestered into deposits in the growing crust of the Earth as dead creatures sank in the deep oceans or were buried as part of ancient forests. The biosphere of planet Earth was becoming an ever more complex place, but also ever cleaner as substances toxic to life forms became progressively isolated from the biosphere.

The modern atmosphere, including its stratospheric shields against ionizing radiation from space, is also a product of the collective action of living things. Each organism shapes the environment of which it is an inextricable part, and is shaped in turn by that environment. The co-evolution of all life forms as elements of tightly interdependent ecosystems vastly accelerated the throughput and efficiency of processing of material resources through the biosphere. The sustainability of planet Earth rests upon the diversity, adaptability and efficiency of the ecosystems that it supports and which have shaped its surface.

The living system of planet Earth

This seething mass of life constantly adapts to changing conditions as part of a single, unified planetary mega-ecosystem, or biosphere. In effect, the whole biosphere can be compared to a homeostatic organism, each component of which acts to maintain the stability of the whole upon which its survival depends.

This concept of the biosphere as a contiguous whole lies at the heart of the Gaia theory. British scientist James Lovelock is well known as the prime proponent of what we now refer to as Gaia, along with the American evolutionary biologist Lynne Margulis (Lovelock, 1991). What may be less well known is that James Lovelock was, at that time, an atmospheric scientist, and his formulation of Gaia arose from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)-sponsored research about the most effective means for detecting life on other planets. The presence of life on Earth, argued Lovelock, could be detected from afar by the instability of its atmosphere – free oxygen to name but one such indicator of instability – caused by the collective action of living things. The same principle should apply elsewhere in the universe, providing a ‘fingerprint’ for other worlds upon which life may exist, or may have existed.

Closer to home, this promoted the concept of a homeostatic Earth biosphere of closely co-evolved ecosystems and species, each contributing to and benefiting from the stability of the whole. This whole-system perspective is indeed central to thinking about the workings of the Earth system, and therefore for sustainability. To seek to understand any element of nature, of which humanity is but a subset, outside of the context of the ecosystems with which it is interdependent, at whatever scale, is to disregard its very essence, origins and future dependencies.

The development of the paradigm of ‘systems thinking’ over the past four decades has unlocked new understandings of complex systems. ‘Systems thinking’ is based on understanding the properties of systems as a whole and the relationships of their components. These patterns and relationships within complex systems can not necessarily be deduced by (reductive) analysis of their constituent parts in isolation. By definition, a system will have emergent properties that exceed ‘the sum of the parts’, such as the catalytic properties of enzyme molecules, the capacity for consciousness arising from the mass of human brain cells, or the beneficial ‘ecosystem services’ produced by processes occurring between ecosystem constituents (this is addressed in detail in Chapter 1.4). ‘Systems thinking’ focuses on whole dynamic systems, and the first-order principles that govern them, aiding understanding about and enabling strategic decision-making affecting the system as a whole. This is central to true sustainable development, which is founded on respect for the interdependent relationships within the highly complex socio-ecological system of planet Earth.

Natural laws, living organisms and ecosystem resources

One of the characteristics of living organisms is their dependence upon energy and chemical transformations. All living things are therefore agents of change within the biosphere, as well as reflecting the evolutionary pressures that the developing Earth system places upon them. And, within the complex system of the biosphere, all components interact to maintain matter in constant circulation through the net capture of solar energy. The laws of nature that relate to flows of matter and energy throughout the biosphere are therefore of particular importance to understanding the workings and sustainability (i.e. capacity for indefinite continuance) of the system as a whole.

All interdependent elements of the biosphere – be that a bacterium, elephant, ocean or economic decision – are indissoluble from and interdependent with the whole. All affect, and are as inevitably affected by, every other element of material and energy flows. And all elements, as indeed all interactions between them, are subject to the rules of natural law.

The laws of thermodynamics, together with the principle of matter conservation, collectively form some of the most important principles for understanding the sustainable Earth system. The purpose of this chapter is not to analyse these natural laws in huge detail, but to provide a working understanding of how they operate to maintain the sustainability of the natural world, of which humanity and our activities are indissoluble parts.

In essence, the principle of matter conservation tells us that ‘matter cannot be created or destroyed’. Paraphrased, one could describe this principle as, ‘everything’s got to be somewhere’. Matter does not just appear or disappear. According to this principle, atoms are not lost or created in chemical reactions, though they can combine into new arrangements (molecules). Equally, wastes emitted to the environment on the ‘dilute and disperse’ principle do not simply stop existing, although some policy-makers act as if this were true. We’ll return to this point later.

The first law of thermodynamics – ‘energy cannot be created or destroyed’ – tells us that this conservation principle also applies to energy. Put simply, all energy has to come from somewhere and cannot be created or destroyed, though it may change its form. Heat dissipated to the atmosphere does not ‘go away’, and all inputs of energy into a system have to have a source.

Collectively, the principle of matter conservation and the first law of thermodynamics are known as the ‘conservation laws’. Of course, Einstein’s now famous (if little understood) equation E = mc² tells us that mass (i.e. matter) and energy are inter-convertible in nuclear reactions, and this is particularly important in solar processes. But, boring and non-relative as they may be, the good old-fashioned conservation laws remain perfectly relevant to every aspect of the planet’s cycles, our day-to-day lives, and pretty much every conceivable business and organizational decision on this planet. They therefore represent a sound basis for sustainable decision-making.

The second law of thermodynamics is a little more esoteric but, in lay terms, can be paraphrased as, ‘matter and energy tend to disperse spontaneously’. Energy will tend to flow from high to low states. The ‘embodied energy’ within matter, such as the energy inherent within chemical bonds, means that physical substances will also tend to disperse and degrade as that energy tends to be released and dissipated. Gases spread out and intermingle, nutrients entering a river tend to become diluted throughout the whole system, cars rust and jelly babies scatter everywhere when you drop a bag of them down the stairs. There are profundities hidden in the second law of thermodynamics, but it can be paraphrased as, ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’. This is because, for everything, there has to be a net input of concentrated energy, in the form of the ‘embodied’ energy within the structure of matter or direct input of other forms of energy. The payee of energy bills is often invisible, but always present.

The embodiment of energy in matter is an important principle emerging from these laws. In terms of their constituent atoms, there is no difference between, on the one hand, the contents of one jar containing glucose (a sugar) and a little oxygen and, on the other, a similar jar containing carbon dioxide and water. Yet we know that sugar powers our bodies and that oxygen is essential for us to breathe. The difference between the contents of the two jars in our ‘thought experiment’ is the way in which the carbon, oxygen and hydrogen atoms are arranged. It is in the concentration and structure of matter that the energy is embodied. Hence, sugars can be burned to release that energy, or may be eaten and metabolized to liberate power for our muscles and minds.

Nature's cycles

The ecosystems of planet Earth have evolved over billions of years to capture solar energy and to keep matter in circulation. Life not only changes the world around it, but also maintains the stability of the biosphere in which it has evolved. And the cyclic processes within the biosphere of planet Earth are of fundamental importance to its sustainable operation.

In crude but relevant terms, photosynthetic processes are nature’s innovation for the capture of energy, converting it through a series of biochemical pathways into the bonds within sugar molecules. The constituent atoms of these sugar molecules are derived from carbon dioxide and water. A huge diversity of other complex organic chemicals are also produced by cells, but ultimately the primary organic (carbon-containing) building blocks start off as sugars, and the ‘energy bills’ for their manufacture are paid by solar energy and...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures, Tables and Boxes
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Environmental Context
• Part 3 Managing Environmental Performance
• Part 4 Measuring and Communicating Environmental Performance
• Part 5 Evaluation Tools
• Part 6 The Challenges Ahead for the Environmental Profession
• Index