Safety and Environmental Management Systems
Some may think that these two things are the same. When you look at ISO14001 and AS4801 they seem to have the same expectations. But I have noticed some scope creep.
I have notices that when people are assessing their environmental aspects to find the level of significance, they look at it from the same way as safety looks at hazards and risks. But we have to remember that safety is not environment and environment is not safety.
Risk assessment in Australia, in the past, utilised the standard AS 4360 Risk Management. In one of the appendices of this standard, there was an example of risk assessment. This example was taken up with gusto and it was applied to safety with the whole likelihood and consequence risk register.
This worked well for safety, but crippled environmental management systems. Enviros and Environmental Managers tried to fit the multidimensional environment into the two dimensional safety and it just didn't work. Why? because Enviros forgot one of the core principles that they learnt at uni - Environmental Impact Assessment!
Impact Assessment and in particular Environmental Impact Assessment is usually part of big project planning and approvals. But the ISO14001 provides a level of guidance that surprisingly looks like Impact Assessment and not Risk Assessment.
A large number of businesses use the likelihood and consequences matrix to identify risk. Most if not all managers understand this because it has been the core teaching of risk management over the last ten years. It is also popular because safety is popular. Repeating: this does not work for environmental risk assessment, because you should not be doing an environmental risk assessment, you should be doing an Environmental Impact Assessment.
So the question is: how do you do an easy environmental impact assessment? It's about creating an impact matrix to determine the relationship between an activity (or aspect) and environmental impact area (Air, Energy, Soil, Water, etc). This will in-turn identify the significant aspects of the business and the area in which the organisation will mostly impact on within the environment.
It is time to move out of risk assessment and into impact assessment for Environmental Management Systems.
Some may think that these two things are the same. When you look at ISO14001 and AS4801 they seem to have the same expectations. But I have noticed some scope creep.
I have notices that when people are assessing their environmental aspects to find the level of significance, they look at it from the same way as safety looks at hazards and risks. But we have to remember that safety is not environment and environment is not safety.
Risk assessment in Australia, in the past, utilised the standard AS 4360 Risk Management. In one of the appendices of this standard, there was an example of risk assessment. This example was taken up with gusto and it was applied to safety with the whole likelihood and consequence risk register.
This worked well for safety, but crippled environmental management systems. Enviros and Environmental Managers tried to fit the multidimensional environment into the two dimensional safety and it just didn't work. Why? because Enviros forgot one of the core principles that they learnt at uni - Environmental Impact Assessment!
Impact Assessment and in particular Environmental Impact Assessment is usually part of big project planning and approvals. But the ISO14001 provides a level of guidance that surprisingly looks like Impact Assessment and not Risk Assessment.
A large number of businesses use the likelihood and consequences matrix to identify risk. Most if not all managers understand this because it has been the core teaching of risk management over the last ten years. It is also popular because safety is popular. Repeating: this does not work for environmental risk assessment, because you should not be doing an environmental risk assessment, you should be doing an Environmental Impact Assessment.
So the question is: how do you do an easy environmental impact assessment? It's about creating an impact matrix to determine the relationship between an activity (or aspect) and environmental impact area (Air, Energy, Soil, Water, etc). This will in-turn identify the significant aspects of the business and the area in which the organisation will mostly impact on within the environment.
It is time to move out of risk assessment and into impact assessment for Environmental Management Systems.