Environmental Management and Sustainable Development: EMS, EIA and LCA, Risk, Law and Policy, Energy and Sustainability

An environmental management system (EMS) is the part of an organisation’s management that sets its environmental policy and delivers it, built on the Plan–Do–Check–Act cycle: plan (policy, identification of environmental aspects and legal requirements, objectives), do (resources, training, operational control, emergency preparedness), check (monitoring, internal audit, evaluation of compliance) and act (management review and continual improvement). ISO 14001 specifies the requirements of an EMS against which an organisation can be certified; it requires a commitment to compliance, to the prevention of pollution and to continual improvement, but sets no performance levels of its own. The wider ISO 14000 series supplies the tools: ISO 14004 (guidance on implementing an EMS), ISO 14031 (environmental performance evaluation), the ISO 14020 series (environmental labels and declarations), ISO 14040 and 14044 (life cycle assessment) and ISO 14064 (greenhouse-gas accounting), with auditing guided by ISO 19011. An environmental audit is a systematic, documented and objective check — of compliance with law and permits, of the management system against its standard, or of the use of energy, water and materials and the generation of waste — carried out periodically by internal or external auditors.

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) predicts and evaluates the effects of a proposed project before it is approved, so that alternatives and mitigation can be built in. In India it is governed by the EIA Notification, 2006 under the Environment (Protection) Act: projects are Category A (appraised at the central level by an Expert Appraisal Committee) or Category B (appraised by the state-level authority), and the process has four stages — screening, scoping (terms of reference), public consultation (a public hearing and written responses) and appraisal, leading to the grant or refusal of environmental clearance and an environmental management plan with monitoring. Impact identification methods include checklists, matrices such as the Leopold matrix (project actions against environmental characteristics, each cell rated for magnitude and importance), networks that trace secondary impacts, and overlays of maps. The Battelle Environmental Evaluation System scores the environment with parameter importance units (PIU, 1000 in all) and an environmental quality index (EQ, 0 to 1) for each parameter, giving environmental impact units EIU = Σ PIU × EQ, compared with and without the project. Life cycle assessment (LCA), standardised in ISO 14040/14044, adds up a product’s environmental burdens over its whole life — raw materials, manufacture, use and end of life — for a defined functional unit, in four phases: goal and scope, inventory analysis (inputs and emissions), impact assessment (emissions multiplied by characterisation factors into categories such as global warming in CO₂-eq or acidification in SO₂-eq) and interpretation.

Human health risk assessment has four steps. Hazard identification asks whether a substance can cause harm, from toxicological and epidemiological evidence. Dose–response assessment quantifies it: for non-carcinogens a threshold below which no adverse effect is expected, expressed as a reference dose RfD (mg/kg·d); for carcinogens, usually assumed to have no threshold, a slope factor SF ((mg/kg·d)⁻¹), the upper-bound lifetime risk per unit dose. Exposure assessment estimates the dose, as the chronic daily intake CDI = (C × IR × EF × ED)/(BW × AT), with C the concentration, IR the intake rate, EF and ED the exposure frequency and duration, BW the body weight and AT the averaging time (a lifetime, for carcinogens). Risk characterisation combines them: the hazard quotient HQ = CDI/RfD, with HQ > 1 a concern and a hazard index HI = ΣHQ for several substances; and the lifetime cancer risk = CDI × SF, usually compared with a target range of about 10⁻⁶ to 10⁻⁴.

Occupational health and hygiene protects workers through the anticipation, recognition, evaluation and control of workplace hazards. Physical hazards are noise, vibration, heat and cold, ionising and non-ionising radiation, poor illumination and pressure; chemical hazards are dusts (silica causing silicosis, asbestos causing asbestosis and mesothelioma, coal dust), fumes, mists, vapours and gases, entering by inhalation, skin contact or ingestion; and there are biological, ergonomic and psychosocial hazards too. Airborne exposure is judged against threshold limit values: the TLV–TWA, an 8-hour time-weighted average to which nearly all workers can be exposed day after day; the TLV–STEL, a 15-minute short-term limit; and the TLV–C, a ceiling never to be exceeded. The time-weighted average is TWA = ΣC_it_i/8, and for a mixture of substances with similar effects the exposure is acceptable only if ΣC_i/TLV_i ≤ 1. Noise exposure is combined the same way as a dose, D = ΣC_i/T_i, the time spent at each level over the time permitted at it. Control follows the hierarchy of controls: elimination, substitution, engineering controls (enclosure, ventilation, isolation), administrative controls (rotation, training, limiting exposure time), and personal protective equipment last.

Environmental law aims to prevent and control pollution, conserve resources, allocate responsibility for harm and give the public a remedy. Two principles run through it. The polluter pays principle puts the cost of preventing and remedying pollution on whoever causes it, so that the price of a product reflects its environmental cost. The precautionary principle says that where there is a threat of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty is not a reason to postpone cost-effective measures to prevent it — shifting the burden of proof towards the developer. The Supreme Court of India held both to be part of the law of the land in Vellore Citizens’ Welfare Forum v. Union of India (1996), and both appear, with sustainable development, in the National Green Tribunal Act.

The Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1974 was India’s first major pollution law; it created the Central and State Pollution Control Boards, requires the consent of the State Board to establish or operate any plant that discharges effluent, and was amended in 1978 and 1988 — the 1988 amendment giving the Boards power to direct the closure of an industry or the stoppage of its water or electricity supply. The Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981 extended the same consent-based regime to air, with air pollution control areas; its 1987 amendment brought noise within the definition of an air pollutant and gave the Boards similar powers of closure. The Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, passed after the Bhopal gas disaster of 1984, is umbrella legislation: it empowers the Central Government to take all measures it considers necessary to protect and improve the environment, to set standards, to regulate the location of industries and the handling of hazardous substances, and to issue directions, and nearly all the waste rules, the EIA Notification and the noise rules are made under it. The National Green Tribunal Act, 2010 set up a specialised tribunal for the effective and expeditious disposal of civil cases raising a substantial question of environment under the laws listed in its schedule — among them the Water and Air Acts, the Environment (Protection) Act and the Biological Diversity Act — and directs it to apply the principles of sustainable development, precaution and polluter pays. The National Environment Policy, 2006 set out the objectives of conservation, intra- and inter-generational equity, integration of environment into development, efficiency in resource use, good governance and enhanced resources for conservation.

International environmental law rests on a few principles: the sovereign right of states over their resources together with the responsibility not to cause damage beyond their borders (Stockholm Principle 21, restated as Rio Principle 2); prevention; precaution (Rio Principle 15); polluter pays (Rio Principle 16); prior environmental impact assessment (Rio Principle 17); common but differentiated responsibilities; intergenerational equity; and public participation. The treaties give them effect.

A resource is the total quantity of a fuel or mineral that exists, discovered or not; a reserve is the part that is known and economically recoverable with present technology. Reserves therefore grow with exploration, better technology and higher prices even as the resource is consumed, and the reserves-to-production ratio is a snapshot of years remaining at current rates, not a forecast. Non-renewable sources — coal, oil, natural gas and uranium — are stocks formed over geological time; renewable sources — solar, wind, hydro, biomass, geothermal and ocean energy — are flows replenished continuously, though each has limits of land, water, materials or site. The energy–environment nexus is the web of links between energy and the rest of the environment: fossil combustion is the largest source of CO₂, SO₂, NOₓ and particulates; thermal and nuclear power need large volumes of cooling water, and pumping and treating water need energy (the water–energy–food nexus); hydropower floods land and alters rivers; mining degrades land; and even renewables raise questions of land use, materials and end-of-life waste. A wind turbine illustrates the physics of a renewable flow: the power in the wind through a rotor of swept area A is ½ρAv³, and a turbine captures a fraction C_p of it, which cannot exceed the Betz limit of 16/27 ≈ 0.593. Because output varies with the wind, the capacity factor — the energy actually generated in a year divided by rated power × 8760 h — is the honest measure of what an installation delivers.

The Brundtland Commission’s report Our Common Future (1987) defined sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Its concepts are the three pillars — environmental, social and economic — that must be balanced; inter- and intra-generational equity; carrying capacity; and the distinction between weak sustainability, in which natural capital may be replaced by manufactured capital so long as the total is maintained, and strong sustainability, in which critical natural capital must be maintained in its own right. The Sustainable Development Goals, adopted by the United Nations in 2015 as the 2030 Agenda, are 17 goals with 169 targets, spanning poverty, hunger, health, education, gender equality, water and sanitation, energy, work and growth, industry and infrastructure, inequality, cities, consumption and production, climate, life below water, life on land, peace and institutions, and partnerships. The hurdles are poverty and inequality, rising population and consumption, short-term economic and political horizons, prices that omit environmental costs, lack of finance and technology, weak institutions and enforcement, and the need for global cooperation on shared resources.

Environment and economics meet in the idea of an externality: a cost (pollution) or benefit borne by someone outside the transaction, so that the market over-produces the polluting good. Remedies are regulation (standards), a Pigouvian tax equal to the marginal external damage, and tradable rights. Environmental goods are valued by revealed-preference methods (travel cost, hedonic pricing) and stated-preference methods (contingent valuation), and future costs and benefits are brought to the present by discounting, PV = FV/(1 + r)ⁿ — which makes the choice of discount rate decisive for long-lived problems such as climate change. Carbon pricing puts a price on emissions either directly, as a carbon tax that fixes the price and lets the quantity adjust, or through emission trading (cap and trade), which fixes the total quantity by issuing a limited number of allowances and lets their price be set by trading. Trading achieves the cap at least total cost, because firms that can abate cheaply do more of it and sell their surplus allowances to those whose abatement is dear, until everyone’s marginal abatement cost equals the allowance price. ESG (environmental, social and governance) frameworks ask companies to measure and disclose their environmental impacts (emissions, energy, water, waste), social performance (labour, safety, community) and governance (board structure, ethics, transparency), so that investors and regulators can compare them; international frameworks such as the GRI standards and climate-related disclosure standards are used alongside national requirements, which in India take the form of SEBI’s Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report for the largest listed companies.