EHJ, June 2002, pages 168-170 Robert Halford illustrates how lasting progress on sustainable development can be achieved through professional support and developing the skills of environmental health officers

In 2001, Sustainability First, a UK charity formed to help professionals recognise the importance of sustainable development skills and knowledge, led moves to create new educational standards for sustainable development. It was suggested by some parties that an entirely new sustainable development profession is needed, but thankfully, this latter suggestion was refuted.

While sustainable development does not call for a distinct profession in its own right, to progress forward, the principles of sustainable development need to be integrated into all professions and all disciplines need to work together. In the wider professional community, there is undoubtedly a patchy and inconsistent understanding of sustainable development and what is to be done about raising the competency of professionals.

Environmental health, as a holistic profession, is well suited to the sustainability challenge. However, environmental health officers, and indeed other professionals of all backgrounds, will need to learn new skills and work together within the principles of sustainable development to be able to put sustainability into practice. They will also need understanding of how solutions have been developed for sustainable development issues and have the appropriate personal and technical skills to deliver results.

THE LOCAL AUTHORITY CONTEXT
Progress on sustainability hinges on the professional staff within an organisation. Where investment is made developing and facilitating professionals, excellent progress is possible. In order to become more sustainable it is vitally important that local authorities become "intelligent" organisations - ie reducing resource consumption, generating less waste and understanding how it interrelates with the environment, the community and the local economy. All of this requires greater co-operation and a shared mindset.
A holistic approach is required as a highly specialised or narrow outlook, from which professionals have tended to work from in the past, is not guaranteed to deliver a sustainable future. Interdisciplinary team working is essential - the trend for professions to become increasingly specialised is not necessarily a problem, provided that they can maintain a dialogue together, pooling experience and ideas.

GAP ANALYSIS
A gap analysis of the sustainable development process within local authorities is a useful tool for mapping existing policies and practices. Typical professional issues confronting EHOs include:

• the perception gap (ie understanding what sustainability is actually about);
• the skills gap (ie what skills and training are needed to deliver change?); and
• the right tools (ie what tools are available to do the job?).

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
There are two basic options available when facing up to the challenge in closing this gap: do it the long way by training and equipping professionals for the job; or, alternatively, buy an "off the shelf" strategy with the risk of it gathering dust unused.

The most effective approach is to prepare a professional development programme for those working in the organisation. This approach takes longer but has lasting impact as it begins to change the people, the culture and the ethos of the organisation from within.

REALITY CHECK
A major problem is that while the sustainability argument has in one sense been accepted, the same set of problems exist today as in the 1970s when the concept of the environment and sustainable development first became internationalised.

It is widely accepted that as the Western nations have progressed through the 20th century, they have done so at another nation's cost. The underdeveloped world is being stripped to fuel the resource hungry economies of the developed nations with serious environmental, social and economic consequences. This presents a critical problem since the per capita demand for land in developed and developing nations continues to rise and exceeds the global carrying capacity.
For example, London now requires a land area 125 times the size of Greater London to support its resource demands and to absorb its wastes; this is slightly bigger than the total land area of Great Britain. If all six billion humans today lived as an average UK citizen, the human race would need three planets to support it.2,3

The Washington-based World Watch Institute, in its report for 2001, has summarised that: "Today's economy thrives on massive resource use, generating large amounts of pollution and disrupting natural cycles - imposing increasingly unsustainable burdens on the environment...The deterioration of critical ecosystems means that communities have less protection against extreme weather events and disease vectors are able to spread more easily, compromising human health and well being."4

Therefore, it is perhaps no surprise that since sustainability continues to present us with a problem there are now at least 250 published attempts to define what sustainable development might be.

PERCEPTION GAP
The first step, therefore, in addressing sustainability is the perception gap. Sustainable development can be a difficult concept to engage with, and a failure to accept that there is a problem that needs tackling will translate into weak decision making, poor advice to elected members, and ultimately place the local authority and its area at a disadvantage. It is therefore essential to spend time considering what sustainable development is about.

First, what is often not fully understood is that "sustainability" as a term is an idealised state and "sustainable development" is used as a term to describe how one might reach that idealised state. In truth, there are very few examples of completely sustainable communities and thus it follows that the solutions required have yet to be found or implemented.

The "three pillars" of sustainable development are reflected in the wellbeing powers of the Local Government Act 2000, to promote social, economic and environmental wellbeing. This has been translated down into 15 headline indicators by the UK Government, which now influence and direct government policy. The objectives of this policy include:

• social progress which recognises the needs of everyone;
• effective protection of the environment;
• prudent use of natural resources; and
• maintenance of high and stable levels of economic growth and employment.

EHOs are vitally important as half the UK Government headline indicators are influenced by the work of environmental health departments. Brian Hanna, CIEH president and member of the Sustainable Development Commission, recently stated that: "The environmental health profession has a lead role in delivering sustainability, no other local government role covers so many of the Government's key priorities. It is a good time therefore, to take advantage of its high profile." (EHN, 23 November 2001, page 3).

THE SKILLS GAP
Without the right tools and support, delivering on the sustainable development agenda is a non-starter. Hands-on experience of training professionals from many disciplines shows that awareness is generally low and few understand the tools that are available to respond to the sustainability agenda. Some of those relating to the environmental dimension of sustainability include: environmental management systems (EMS); waste minimisation; "factor four"; and value systems.

ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
As it stands, very few local authorities are accurately able to identify what their own impacts are and how to manage or reduce them. As it is essential for an organisation to understand how it interacts with the environment, EMS is a valuable tool in achieving this. EMS is a formalised system of managing the interactions between a service or process and the environment, however it is flexible in how it can be designed and applied. The motive of an EMS is to promote sustainable development through continual improvement through proper environmental management.

The significance of EMS is that it moves the environmental agenda up the management hierarchy and enables sustainable development to be addressed with hard data and clear lines of responsibility. For local authorities, the introduction of EMS is important to:

• get its own house in order and to win credibility by demonstrating it is tackling its environmental impacts as a strategic issue;
• understanding the consequences of resource consumption;
• improving the environmental and economic performance of the council as sound environmental management equals good business management; and
• command the respect of the business and industrial sector; EHOs will find EMS essential to understand the systems approach to environmental management in the private sector. As an example, the Environment Agency will take into account externally audited EMS (eg ISO14001) as evidence of good management on IPPC sites, EHOs should therefore understand the rudiments of EMS.

WASTE MINIMISATION
Waste minimisation is an essential tool that is based on a simple hierarchy - eliminate, reduce, reuse, recycle and disposal - for dealing with resource consumption and waste streams.
This simple hierarchy helped deliver £100m savings to UK industry in 2001. Businesses using this tool are seeing average savings of 1 per cent to 4 per cent on annual turnover. Local authorities are no different and can implement waste minimisation, either for themselves or set up waste minimisation clubs for the local business community, and can also achieve savings.

The key to waste minimisation is not recycling, it concerns a fundamental re-think on how to use fewer resources to deliver the service or product. Cross-discipline professionals, working together across departments to deliver the objectives of the product or service with less waste from beginning to end, are vital.

"FACTOR FOUR"
Linked to the waste minimisation tool, is "factor four" - a study undertaken for the influential Club of Rome in 1999, which demonstrated that the technology already exists to make a four-fold cut in resource consumption. Arguably, a factor 10 cut in resource consumption is not only necessary but already possible.

The UK Sustainable Development Commission has accepted the notion that "factor four", as a minimum, should be regarded as a reasonable objective in resource efficiency. Challengingly, a technical fix alone will not deliver sustainability. Efficient technology already exists, but unless everyone changes how they do things, consumption will continue to rise. The significance of "factor four" is that it provides the professional with a criteria or a benchmark against which to assess the sustainability or desirability of future plans or projects.

VALUES
The value systems for a sustainable organisation should recognise that global capacity to deliver up resources and absorb waste is finite. Some successful private companies are pioneering sustainability through management systems that operate on the basis of values which respect this fact. For local authorities, experience shows that shared values improve communication between professional groups and departments, enabling officers to make the simple but important step changes.

Shared values make it easier for professional groups to communicate and network effectively and to overcome barriers. Once communication channels are opened up, it is possible to promote joined-up working by facilitating working groups and developing tasked-based workshops.

The sustainability challenge is for the interdisciplinary barriers to come down and for individual professions to work together. Sustainable development starts with the people who are prepared to make the changes necessary to win a sustainable future. This approach needs the correct tools and support to deliver tangible results. Professionals will need to learn new skills, how to cultivate and work with sustainable value systems, and how to develop improved communication and networking skills.

For those local authorities that have taken on sustainability as a professional development issue, the professional officer structure has become more informed, more confident, better at communicating and fully equipped for the job.

Robert Halford, an EHO working as a consultant and trainer to the public sector, is an adviser for the DEFRA/DTI Envirowise programme. Contact Enviro Management, on tel: 01559 363836 or e-mail: robert@enviromanagement.co.uk

References

1. Sustainable development standards; A preliminary consultation exercise, Sustainability First, October 2001.
2. Girardet (1999), Creating sustainable cities, Green Books 1999.
3. "Achieving a better quality of life", Government Annual Report 2001, DEFRA, March 2002.
4. Vital signs 2001 - 2002, World Watch Institute, Earthscan 2002.