An environmental manager ensures the long-term survival of a natural environment and its resources, using environmental management standards to carry out their work. They navigate legal environmental requirements and may help companies exceed them for practical or ideological reasons. Their job is to create a sustainable system for humans to enjoy natural resources without destroying them.
An environmental manager is a person who cares for a region of the world in terms of how humans can sustainably interact. An environmental manager may work for a private company, non-profit organization or government body to help ensure the long-term survival of a natural environment and its resources. An environmental manager has many responsibilities, including generating and disbursing funds, creating project goals and implementing them, recruiting staff, and handling interactions between various groups and organizations.
There are several different environmental management standards (EMS) used by an environmental manager to carry out their work. The most common is the ISO 14001 standard, which is a comprehensive standard for assessing risk management in environmental areas. Other standards tend to be aimed at simplifying ISO 14001 while retaining its most vital elements. Some popular alternatives include the Natural Step standard, the Natural Capital standard used by the World Bank, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards, and the Green Dragon EMS.
One can think of environmental management as addressing two main concerns, which present a fair amount of overlap. The first is the large set of legal environmental requirements needed to do business in most developed countries. The second is the group of extrajudicial environmental concerns that may be pursued for various practical or ideological reasons.
The body of environmental protections, which have been implemented in most developed countries since at least the 1960s, is quite massive, and navigating them can be difficult for many companies. An environmental manager has a comprehensive understanding of the law as it pertains to his industry and helps the company maintain its integrity in the eyes of the law as it undertakes new ventures. This person also tracks laws as they are passed to ensure the company remains in compliance.
Some companies pursue environmental sustainability that exceeds the legal obligations imposed on them. They may do this to generate a positive public image, to make funds available to those who meet certain environmental criteria, and for ideological reasons. An environmental manager, in this case, can help the company minimize its costs, while maximizing the degree to which it can help protect the natural world.
Different managers can work in different capacities and biomes. Some may be charged with protecting timber resources, others with protecting mineral resources. Some may look after the air quality in a region, while others may look to fisheries and strive to ensure that populations never drop below a certain level. They may work with resource-extracting companies or non-profit organizations, helping to keep those same companies in check.
Ultimately, however, an environmental manager’s job is not to protect the natural world per se, as may be the case for some environmentalists. Rather, this person is tasked with creating a sustainable system in which humans can continue to enjoy the resources made available by the natural world in perpetuity, without destroying the resource base through unsustainable practices. In this sense, an environmental manager can be seen as a resource manager, fulfilling his mission first and foremost for the good of humanity, with benefits to the natural world as a positive side effect.
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