Essays written from thirty years of environmental and sustainability consulting: governance, regulation, institutional failure, and the everyday gap between what a policy promises and what actually gets built, funded or enforced. Many of these pieces are openly sceptical of the industry they come from, questioning fashionable language, weak accountability, and the distance between sustainability as spoken about and sustainability as practised.
In Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), we take decisions on the project, the preferred alternative and the required environmental management measures. To improve our understanding and take appropriate decisions, transforming data into information and into knowledge is required. It is often hard, however, to differenciate between data, information and knowledge (DIK). Sometimes these terms are used interchangeably. EIAs are often weak because they rely mostly on…
Read the full post →Environmental and Social (E&S) Governance is increasingly becoming complex today. Earlier, project developers had to comply only with the regulations imposed through various acts and rules – but now there are requirements coming from investors and lenders, supply-chain & markets and the neighbourhood. These requirements in many cases go beyond the laws of the land. Further, concepts such as shared value and benefit sharing have…
Read the full post →My Professor friend was once again in the news. He became an Advisor to the Governor of the Central Bank last month and was asked to take on the Green Agenda. The Governor had apparently attended some UN meeting on Greening and had found that lot was happening in the financing world on this topic and India had not much to say. That was shameful.…
Read the full post →My Professor friend was recently awarded by the Ministry of Environment & Forests towards his contributions for saving expenditures on environmental monitoring incurred by the Pollution Control Boards (PCBs), industries and Urban Local Bodies (ULBs). The Professor was top in the news, on TV and print media. The exact details or his precise contributions were not known - but there was praise for his ingenuity,…
Read the full post →In India, as in most countries, permits are required to establish and operate businesses that have environmental and social sensitivities. The Pollution Control Boards (PCBs) in India require businesses to obtain consents to establish and operate, following a well-laid-down review and permitting process. These consents prescribe the conditions that are to be met. The conditions generally refer to the mitigation plans, the monitoring and…
Read the full post →Today in India, you cannot operate a boiler without a certified operator, but you can operate a wastewater treatment plant without such a certification requirement. Our regulators, the Pollution Control Boards (PCBs), do not think that it is critical to insist that operators running the wastewater treatment plants have the necessary training. Programs for training and certification for operation of wastewater treatment plants have matured…
Read the full post →Green buildings mainstream sustainability in planning, layout, orientation and design, while making choice of material, source of energy, fit outs and technology. The idea is to reduce life cycle impacts/risks. Several green rating systems have emerged in the last decade that guide and inspire architects, planners, builders and material / equipment suppliers to come up with buildings with various shades of green. Focus has…
Read the full post →Most major investors to India, project proponents and the line ministries have been complaining against the inordinate delays and ambiguities in the decisions related to the Environmental Clearance (EC). The New government is therefore making all the efforts to move on the “fast track”. The present Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar has worked at great speed in his first 100 days and cleared 240 of 325…
Read the full post →The claim of biodegradability is often associated with environmentally-friendly products, but I often wonder what exactly does this mean? The answer is not simple as there are many faces of biodegradability. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines as biodegradable those materials which can decompose under natural conditions. The American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), a leader in setting international standards, states that biodegradation…
Read the full post →When we look at greenness of a product, type, extent and material of packaging should also a part of the perspective. While a product could be green, its packaging may not. Packaging accounts for almost 10 % of the environmental impact of anything bought. In estimating the "environmental impact" of the package, we assess the material (i.e. embodied intensity), its biodegradability and recyclability, the…
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