Polin Kumar Saha :Environment is considered as the heart of our ecosystem and environmental management dominates the socioeconomic development of the human being. Since the current world is now asked over a new dimension and global phenomenon ‘sustainable development’; therefore an issue of managing environmental resources has become the contested topic in recent days. But, the process of environmental management is still controversial in that sense of what and what limit of resources should be conserved for the future. The necessary steps of environmental management have been initiated globally with the help of different management tools while a tool “Environmental Management System (EMS)” is becoming as the increased trend of its popularity in many countries including Bangladesh. In addition, EMS has also been concerned about its potentiality in a country’s prioritized movement towards sustainable development.EMS is a tool of the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 14000 family of standards that looks for all kinds of environmental responsibilities for companies and organizations. Among the ISO’s series, ISO 14001 is ‘star standard’ of environmental quality management. The existing EMS is based on a cyclic system: Policy-Planning-Checking-Review-Act, where the environmental standards are developed and measured through a voluntary and consensus-based approach within a company. This is a system based approach to promote our environmental management system. The Government of Bangladesh has already exposed several types of policies related to our environmental management (e.g. Environment Conservation Rules 1997, Bangladesh Environment Conservation Law 2000 etc.) that actually partly adopted for industrializations towards achieving sustainability. In this aspect, we indeed have some kind of related policies for our environmental development, but we could not develop a robust environmental management system based on those policies. The management of environmental issues in an organization supports not only for maintaining compliance of government rules; but also for setting the indicators of the country’s sustainable development goals (SDGs), the process can establish an agenda of many other cross cutting issues.Till 2014, there are more than 300,000 certifications to ISO 14001 in 171 countries around the world. The number of Bangladeshi EMS users is steadily increased starting from 2001 and to be expected to grow up due to our shifting from MDGs to SDGs by 2030. Towards achieving SDGs, Bangladesh may prefer ISO 14001 EMS; because it can be applied in all types of organizations whatever it is profit oriented industry or service sector. But, to get the sustainability benefits from the existing EMS, an integrated approach to EMS should be established in line with the designated sustainability principles before going through its full phase application in organizations. Since, the “plan” of EMS is voluntary; therefore, our specific knowledge and experience should be concrete and based on our country’s context where a process of building awareness on sustainability issues can make the existing EMS inclusive and applicable.Under the common rules, the existing companies and service sectors have to be ensured about its capacity to minimize the environmental impacts due to their maintenance and operation. By laws they are bound to receive an environmental clearance certificate (ECC) from the Department of Environment (DoE), Government of Bangladesh. In addition, international buyers and donors are also seeking for the respective initiatives of these organizations as they have taken for maintaining the environmental management system properly. Therefore, all companies are becoming enforced under a compliance that should be followed under the international environmental standards in our development path. However, in this context, we argue that the tool ‘EMS’ could give a flexible and strong platform for managing our environmental system in all development sectors while the process partially accommodates a ‘sustainability planning’ for our overall development as well. Sustainability is such a concept through which we manage all of our resources considering all about socio-ecological perspectives where the outcome might be optimal and in continuous. It cannot depend on some national policies only specified for the industries and countries; rather a rigorous and voluntary planning can be needed with the help of those policies. For managing sustainability, many monitoring tools can be used by our organizations, whereas the sustainability purpose could not be served by those tools. Among many other tools, I would say the EMS would be very supportive to achieve our sustainability management if we could integrate the ‘planning’ division of this conventional EMS in line with the four designated sustainability principles: firstly, planning for consumption of scarce materials should be designed in such a way, so that we can reduce our extraction from the earth’s crust gradually. That means, our motive must go for less use of those resources which are the outcome of mining activity. Secondly, less emission to the atmosphere should be considered as much as possible. In this case, gas (pollutants) emission might be occurred during the production, but we have to be planned to minimize it gradually (by setting targets each year). Thirdly, we have no rights to degrade our natural body of land, water or biodiversity. In our planning for environmental management all related activities should be prohibited which degrade the nature by physical means, and finally, equality and equity should be measured in our planning system, so that we can distribute our resources in such a way where we cannot blame our future generations for insufficiency to meet their needs.However, a standard and sustainable EMS can give us the opportunity for continual improvement of environmental quality that ultimately leads to satisfying a major portion of our sustainable development goals. Considering the sustainable EMS movement, we are still far behind from our neighboring countries. For example in 2014, China and India moved to the number of 1,17,758 and 6446 ISO EMS certified companies and organizations accordingly whereas only 60 Bangladesh companies were EMS certified by ISO. This number indicates that we are in lack of our awareness of our environmental management and as a result of this; we have to now face more challenges to overcome the country’s sustainability challenges compared to any other south Asian countries. Therefore, we and our government could accelerate this management system in our all development sectors, whereas a transparent and accountable system should be developed at the implementation stage of EMS.(Polin Kumar Saha is a Researcher at BRAC Research and Evaluation Division. [email protected]; [email protected])
