Write Short Essay on Environmental
audits and its scope and importance
Answers
Answer:
plz follow me ❤️
Environmental auditing is carried out when a development is already in place, and is used to check on existing practices, assessing the environmental effects of current activities (ex post). Environmental auditing therefore provides a 'snap-shot' of looking at what is happening at that point in time in an organisation.
Answer:
Origins of Environmental Auditing
Environmental safety and health auditing developed in the early 1970s, largely among companies operating in environmentally intensive sectors such as oils and chemicals. Since then environmental auditing has spread rapidly with a corresponding development of the approaches and techniques adopted. Several factors have influenced this growth.
Industrial accidents. Major incidents such as the Bhopal, Chernobyl and Exxon-Valdez disasters have reminded companies that it is not sufficient to set corporate policies and standards on environmental health and safety matters without ensuring that they are being implemented. Audits can help reduce the risk of unpleasant surprises.
Regulatory developments. Since the early 1970s regulations on environmental topics have increased substantially. This has made it steadily more difficult for a company to ascertain whether a specific plant in a particular country is complying with all of the relevant legislation.
Public awareness. The public has become increasingly aware of, and vocal about, environmental and safety issues. Companies have had to demonstrate to the public that they are managing environmental risks effectively.
Litigation. The growth of legislation has led to a corresponding explosion of litigation and liability claims, particularly in the United States. In Europe and elsewhere, there is growing emphasis on the responsibilities of individual directors and on making information available to the public.
What is an Environmental Audit?
It is important to draw the distinction between auditing and techniques such as environmental impact assessment (EIA). The latter assesses the potential environmental effects of a proposed facility. The essential purpose of an environmental audit is the systematic scrutiny of environmental performance throughout a company’s existing operations. At best, an audit is a comprehensive examination of management systems and facilities; at worst, it is a superficial review.
Scope of the Audit
As the prime objective of audits is to test the adequacy of existing management systems, they fulfil a fundamentally different role from the monitoring of environmental performance. Audits can address one topic, or a whole range of issues. The greater the scope of the audit, the greater will be the size of the audit team, the time spent onsite and the depth of investigation. Where international audits need to be carried out by a central team, there can be good reasons for covering more than one area while onsite to minimize costs.
Basic Steps in Environmental Auditing
Criteria—what do you audit against?
An essential step in establishing an audit programme is to decide the criteria against which the audit will be conducted and to ensure that management throughout the organization knows what these criteria are. Typically criteria used for audits are:
company policies and procedures on environmental matters
applicable legislation and regulations
good environmental management practice.