The attendance was poor again. 11 students attended the lecture and one left after the first hour.
We started with a recap of the characteristics of environment - common property, multiple use and uncovered cost. I explained that these characteristics cause potential conflicts among people. We discussed some of these potential conflicts in the last class. Any society would like to avoid conflicts for development/progress. Societies use three different methods to avoid conflicts: a. Command and Control, b. Economic instruments and c. voluntary initiatives.
Command and control refers to the acts, rules and regulations that are enacted or published by the Government. This can be from the National Government (in our case Governmet of India) such as the Environment (Protection) Act, Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, Hazardous Waste (Management & Handling) Rules etc. Some of the rules may be published by the State Government. For example, Maharastra Motor Vehicles Rules, Maharashtra Factories Rules etc. Still more such command and control measures can come from the Municipalities, such as the Municipal Rules requiring housing societies to segregate waste into wet and dry waste and to have vermicompost pits for wet waste.
Command and Control is also applied by the international community. For example, Kyoto protocol requires countries to cut down on their greenhouse gas emissions; some countries can get carbon credits for their GHG emissions reductions (CDM). The Montreal Protocol is about the elimination of the use of chlorofluoro carbons (CFCs) which were responsible for reducing the ozone layer in the stratosphere; this ozone layer effectively blocked the ultraviolet radiation from the SUN from reaching the earth. We have many such international conventions like the Basel Convention, dealing with transboundary movement of hazardous waste.
Command and Control measures are also used by countries to restrict the entry of products having certain characateristics from other countries. For example, the EU has Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (RoHS), which requires that any product that is exported to Europe does not contain substances like cadmium, lead, mercury, polybromobiphenlys, polybromobiphenylethers. polychlorobiphenyls etc. (there are exemptions to this general rule). Similarly the WEEE directive (Waste Electric and Electronics Equipment Directive) requires exporters to be responsible for taking back the product once the useful life of the product is over. There are such rules/directives on energy use, asbestos, pentachlorophenol , pacakging etc., throughout the world.
Such command and control measures help countries to have a control over the emissions and discharges and use of resources by business organizaions in that country without causing the businesses excessive cost. Sometimes these rules are used as "non-tariff" trade barrier in the post WTO free trade regime, even though WTO is against such a practice.
Economic instruments are used generally influence the way people and organizations behave. By providing tax concessions and cess reductions companies are encouraged to spend money on environmental technologies and improving environmental performance. Some of the other economic instruments are a. Deposit - Refund system (returning cocacola can fetches about 10 cents), b. Emission trading (e.g. instead of spending money in control measures and becoming economically unviable, Government may allow businesses to purchase emission points from low emissions organization and maintain the overall concentration in the ecosystem within the allowed limit), etc. Another economic instrument is Preferential Purchase, where the Government or a private company insists on purchasing products from a company whose environmental performance is good or its product is enivronmentally sound. Concessional interest rate is another economic instrument used by banks for enviornmentally sound investments.
While the business organization does not have control over command and control measures and the economic instruments in the domain of Government, it can have volunatry initiatives positioning them above the requiremet of the Government in terms of compliance and policy. One such initiative is the establishment of ISO-14001, Environmental Management System.
In the second half of the class we started reading the paper "Green and Competitive - Ending the Stalemate" by Michael Porter and Lindane, published in Harvard Business Review in 1995. Students were informed that they should get copies of the paper, if they desired so, from the Library. This paper is a classic paper, for the first time bringing out the thesis that environmental management is about competitiveness and lower costs.
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