The Councillor as Guardian of the Environment


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United Nations Environment Programme
Division of Technology, Industry and Economics

Newsletter and Technical Publications

<The Councillor as Guardian of the Environment>

An Essay and Workshop for Local Elected Leaders on Environmental Governance
with Emphasis on Adopting Environmentally Sound Technologies (ESTs)
- Training for Elected Leadership -

Part I - Essay on the Councillor as Guardian of the Environment
- ESSAY -
Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does
to the web he does to himself. Chief Seattle, Native American Leader, 1857.

Definition and Summary

D. Tactics, Strategies and Approaches for Sustainable Development

4. DETERMINING OPTIONS AND CONSEQUENCES

Once the environmental risks are assessed, either past, present or future, councillors, organizations and communities are expected to make informed decisions that will eliminate or mitigate past indiscretions (sounds better than "mistakes"), resolve current problems, and keep new problems from happening in the future. When these kinds of decisions are made, elected leaders, their managerial and technical staff and the extended family of decision makers in the community who need to be involved should consider both the options available to address the environmental risks and the consequences of each option. This is the "what are" and "what if" stages of environmental decision making. What are the realistic options? What will be the short term and long term consequences, if we decide to adopt a particular option or set of options to address the environmental risk(s)?

One caveat before we move on. Researching the options to be considered in addressing environmental risks, and the consequences of each, can be a complicated process. It will require the council to rely heavily upon its staff and occasionally on external experts, or technical specialists. This doesn't mean a "hands-off" attitude by elected leaders. Your role in setting policy guidelines, articulating community goals and ultimately deciding the allocation of scarce resources will continue to be the framework within which technical options and consequences must be considered. And, you need to challenge the staff and other specialists to be both rigorous and creative when presenting the council with options for addressing environmental risks. Encourage them to challenge you and others with new ways of thinking about environmental issues when presenting their recommendations.

Our intent, in describing this part of the toolbox, is not to make you technical experts but rather to arm you with some insights and ideas about the task of environmental technology assessment (EnTA) so your own role as Guardian of the Environment can be strengthened when technical proposals are brought before council for consideration. We will not be discussing the many nuances involved in the art of decision making. That task is better left to management texts.

Nakuru Revisited

Let's return to Nakuru for a moment as a way of understanding the importance and difficulty of choosing among technical options. While the option of creating a series of new lagoons is often a cost effective and "environmentally sound" alternative for dealing with liquid waste in a relatively small community, it had unexpected consequences when applied to the situation in Nakuru. It also raised the level of debate and discussion about the technical options in the national press and among concerned citizens and officials. We believe this new level of openness, resulting from the experience, will serve those who live beyond the shores of Lake Nakuru.

Harvey Brooks, in an insightful article on sustainable development and environmentally sound technology (and we will get to what this means in a moment), makes two points that are relevant to the situations like those experienced in Nakuru. First,

Dialogues among potentially affected stakeholders are important for the social sustainability
of socio-ecological and socio-technological systems, but these dialogues may be insufficient
without a method for surrogate representation of interests and perspectives that otherwise
cannot participate (for example, young children or future generations).¹⁹

Imagine the citizens of Nakuru held a community dialogue about the liquid waste disposal problem and invited the flamingos to attend. Of course, this sounds silly. But, the flamingos were important stakeholders in the decision that was made in Nakuru and apparently their interests were not fully represented. What Brooks is suggesting we do in cases like this is provide surrogate representation of interests and perspectives that otherwise cannot participate. We talked earlier about the need to be creative and to think divergently. Perhaps there are times when asking individuals to represent stakeholders who can't be present at community dialogues might provide the input needed to understand future consequences from a different and important perspective. All of us might feel a bit foolish playing the role of a flamingo, but then, look at the consequences in Nakuru of not representing this important economic and environmental stakeholder.

Brooks also says:

"One of the greatest threats to sustainability in development may be the appearance of surprises and discontinuities that are
unanticipated or impossible to anticipate. One of the major challenges to policy analysis for sustainable development is how
to cope with such surprises-how to better foresee the possibility of improbable events and develop contingency
plans or "hedging" strategies, given the low probability and random timing of any single event." ²⁰

We would add that policy makers and decision makers, in addition to policy analysts, must be prepared to cope with such surprises and the best coping mechanism is to foresee to the extent possible the consequences of your actions before they are taken. Sustainability is primarily about present options and choices as constrained by past decisions and commitments. Sorting through options and determining their consequences is an exercise that demands us to reach back into the past and to stretch forward into the future for clues that will make current decisions as timeless as possible.

The Art and Science of Environmental Technology

Environmental technology assessment is both an art (the political process of being roughly right in due time rather than precisely right too late) and science (the conduct of scientific inquiry to better understand the consequences of various actions before they become real). At the heart of EnTA is interaction between the political decision making process and efforts by the scientific community to develop readily applicable environmentally sound technologies (ESTs). The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio provided a definition of ESTs that still stands:

"Environmentally sound technologies protect the environment, are less polluting, use all resources
in a more sustainable manner, recycle more of their wastes and products, and handle residual
wastes in a more acceptable manner than the technologies for which they were substitutes."

While this definition makes ESTs sound like the application of scientific methods and technological hardware, the International Environmental Technology Centre (IETC) in Kyoto, Japan assures us that this is far from the reality of what constitutes effective EST development and application. ESTs are a systems approach to problem solving that "includes know-how, procedures, goods and services, and equipment as well as organizational and managerial procedures". From the perspective of the councillor as Guardian of the Environment, the art of EnTA is to assure that the criteria laid down in Rio and elaborated by the UNEP's IETC become the guidelines by which your council makes decisions that have an impact on the environment. To better understand this mandate, we need to look more closely at what the experts say about EnTA as a scientific and political decision making process (the fourth drawer in our toolbox, the one labeled, Determining Options and Consequences).

Revival of the Moribund Rhine

For decades the Rhine River was known as the "sewer of Europe." By 1970, the Rhine was dead. The daily deluge of untreated waste had depleted its oxygen and much of the aquatic fauna had vanished. Mercury and other deadly elements in the sludge were off the charts. Contamination was so rampant that a 160 mile stretch of the river near Cologne had been declared a danger zone. And then, something happened. The politicians got serious. But, not until a fire in a Swiss chemical plant dumped a deadly cocktail of toxic wastes into the river, killing tons of eels, fish and other animals and prompting a drinking water alert for 50 million people down stream.

In the previous quarter century, European governments had spent close to $70 billion in a largely fruitless effort to curb the pollution. Mere money and technology were not enough to turn the tide and restore life to the Rhine. While the politicians talked for decades (mostly in an effort to place blame elsewhere) the river deteriorated. The fire near Basel, Switzerland turned the heat up on the elected and appointed leaders. Goaded by their constituents, the politicians finally acted-and acted in unison. In November 1995, nearly fifty years after their departure, salmon and sea trout had returned to the banks of this historic waterway.

Is there a moral to this tale? Yes. When the options are narrow, the consequences are often wide. Technology was not enough to save the Rhine, even $70 BILLION worth! Governments and businesses needed a common understanding, commitment and agenda for action if results were to be achieved. Rigid safety precautions were adopted and enforced, involving a myriad of state and local governments; factories that generated dangerous wastes were moved away from the river to prevent accidental spills from going berserk; chemical companies donated hundreds of millions of dollars to universities and research centres to find new environmentally sound technologies and to win back disenchanted customers. But best of all, people from all spheres of influence and power began to talk with each other, not past each other. Dialogue had become necessary and fruitful.

An old Ethiopian proverb says, "when spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion." While the battle for the life and soul of the Rhine is not yet won, the monumental progress made in the past decade has proven beyond a doubt the need for a systems approach to complex environmental challenges like the deteriorating state of this important European waterway. By employing a wide range of environmentally sound technologies from sophisticated hardware to managerial skills; unified legislative mandates; citizen involvement; enlightened self-interest; and, yes, courageous and selfless elected local and national leaders, a reprieve was sought and found for the river that emerges from the pristine lakes of Switzerland and makes its way to the northern seas.²¹

Types of Technology

Environmental technologies are those that contribute to solving environmental problems, or enhancing environmental opportunities, by reducing risk, improving cost efficiencies (so money can be conserved to serve other environmental needs), enhancing process effectiveness (achieving results more quickly), and create products, goods, services and processing mechanisms that are environmentally beneficial and, in the least - worst case scenario, environmentally benign. Environmental technologies can be more easily understood by breaking them into four categories: cleaner production technologies; monitoring and assessment technologies; mitigation technologies and local legislative mandates. Listed below are illustrations of these categories of environmental technologies.

Cleaner production technologies:

legal mandates that eliminate the manufacture and use of certain harmful products;
ducational efforts that enlighten the community to eliminate or minimize practices that do harm to the environment
cleanerproduction (process) technologies in the industry sector reduce pollutants and the amounts of energy and natural resources needed to produce, market and use outputs by introducing changes to the core production technology.

Monitoring and assessment technologies

routine evaluation of harmful emissions to assure that they fall within established standards of performance
assessing the potential of new environmental practices to encourage their adoption
requiring industry to disclose publicly chemicals and toxic hazards in their operations

Mitigation technologies:

end-of-pipe technology (involving the installation of equipment for treatment of pollution after it has been generated)
restoring open pit mine areas to productive use
isolating the deterioration of waste materials to assure minimum spread of harmful effects
retraining personnel to operate equipment differently from past practices that have resulted in environmental degradation
rendering materials harmless before they enter the environment

Local legislative mandates

mandating certain standards and imposing penalties on those who violate them
registration of all pesticides required with applicant certification and pre-market testing
enforcement of toxic waste disposal regulations

Because local legislative mandates in the form of policies and administrative regulations are so important as a local government resource, they are often an integral function in the application of the other three types of environmental technologies.

Reflection

Stop for a moment and consider the types of environmental technologies available to councillors and local governments. In the space below, record examples of ways your local government and community have used these types of technologies to improve the environment, and opportunities for new uses.

Cleaner Production Technologies

Examples in use:

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Ones to consider:

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Monitoring/Assessment Technologies

Examples in use:

Ones to consider:

Mitigation and RestorationTechnologies

Examples in use:
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
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Ones to consider:
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
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Local Legislative Mandates

While we could say much more about the process of assessing environmental technologies, and it is tempting, we realize your role as elected official is not to delve too deeply into the technical aspects of the myriad issues that come before council. This is the responsibility of local government staff and consulting specialists. Nevertheless, it is important to be able to evaluate the merits of environmental consequences and the potential consequences of their application, both short term and long run.

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