environmental policy

environmental policy, any measure by a government or corporation or other public or private organization regarding the effects of human activities on the environment, particularly those measures that are designed to prevent or reduce harmful effects of human activities on ecosystems.

Environmental policies are needed because environmental values are usually not considered in organizational decision making. There are two main reasons for that omission. First, environmental effects are economic externalities. Polluters do not usually bear the consequences of their actions; the negative effects most often occur elsewhere or in the future. Second, natural resources are almost always underpriced because they are often assumed to have infinite availability. Together, those factors result in what American ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1968 called “the tragedy of the commons.” The pool of natural resources can be considered as a commons that everyone can use to their own benefit. For an individual, it is rational to use a common resource without considering its limitations, but that self-interested behaviour will lead to the depletion of the shared limited resource—and that is not in anyone’s interest. Individuals do so nevertheless because they reap the benefits in the short term, but the community pays the costs of depletion in the long term. Since incentives for individuals to use the commons sustainably are weak, government has a role in the protection of the commons.

History of environmental policy making

Public policies aimed at environmental protection date back to ancient times. The earliest sewers were constructed in Mohenjo-daro (Indus, or Harappan, civilization) and in Rome (ancient Roman civilization), which date back some 4,500 years and 2,700 years ago, respectively. Other civilizations implemented environmental laws. The city-states of ancient Greece created laws that governed forest harvesting some 2,300 years ago, and feudal European societies established hunting preserves, which limited game and timber harvesting to royalty, effectively preventing overexploitation, by 1000 ce. The city of Paris developed Europe’s first large-scale sewer system during the 17th century. When the effects of industrialization and urbanization increased during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and threatened human health, governments developed additional rules and regulations for urban hygiene, sewage, sanitation, and housing, as well as the first laws devoted to protecting natural landscapes and wildlife (such as the creation of Yellowstone National Park as the world’s first national park in 1872). Wealthy individuals and private foundations, such as the Sierra Club (founded 1892) and the National Audubon Society (founded 1905), also contributed to efforts to conserve natural resources and wildlife.

People became aware of the harmful effects of emissions and use of chemicals in industry and pesticides in agriculture during the 1950s and ’60s. The emergence of Minamata disease in 1956 in Japan, which resulted from mercury discharges from nearby chemical companies, and the publication of Silent Spring (1962) by American biologist Rachel Carson, which highlighted the dangers of pollution, led to a greater public awareness of environmental issues and to detailed systems of regulations in many industrialized countries. In those regulations, governments forbade the use of hazardous substances or prescribed maximum emission levels of specific substances to ensure a minimum environmental quality. Such regulative systems, like the Clean Water and Clean Air acts in the United States, succeeded in effectively addressing point sources (i.e., any discernable discrete location or piece of equipment that discharges pollution), such as industrial plants and utilities, where the cause-and-effect relationship between the actors causing the negative environmental effect could be clearly established.

Nevertheless, some environmental problems persisted, often because of the many nonpoint (diffuse) sources, such as exhaust from private automobiles and pesticide and fertilizer runoff from small farms, that contributed to air and water pollution. Individually, those small sources may not be harmful, but the accumulation of their pollution can exceed the regulative minimum norms for environmental quality. Also, the increasing complexity of chains of cause and effect has contributed to persistent problems. In the 1980s the effects of acid rain showed that the causes of environmental pollution could be separated geographically from its effects. Pollution problems of all types underscored the message that Earth’s natural resources were being depleted and degraded.

From the late 1980s, sustainable development—(i.e., the fostering of economic growth while preserving the quality of the environment for future generations—became a leading concept in environmental policy making. With nature and natural resources considered as economic drivers, environmental policy making was no longer the exclusive domain of government. Instead, private industry and nongovernmental organizations assumed greater responsibility for the environment. Also, the concept emphasized that individual people and their communities play a key role in the effective implementation of policies.