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Produced by a partnership of StudentForce for Sustainability and The Institution of Environmental Sciences. Funded by a generous donation from The Duke of Westminster

Last updated 17/01/2006

 

The Big Picture

Trends in the UK environment and society

Describes some of the trends in the UK environment and society.

Updates on Environmental News & Trends

Crane against skyCooling towers of a power stationfood productionClean Water

Environment

Better air and water quality

Improving waste management

Worse climate changing emissions

More uncontrolled transport and travel

Less biodiversity, wilderness and green space

Society

More reliance on collective action and voluntarism

More environmental litigation and legislation

More demand for clean technologies

More demand for sustainable food, buildings, tourism

More higher education

More globalisation and mobility

More multinational power

Changing national/global security

Work

No jobs for life

More self-employed

Smaller organisations, through downsizing

More transferable skills

More demand for skills than knowledge

More voluntary organisations

More staff mobility

More graduates

So what sort of career for you?

Some attributes of the UK environment are getting better (for example, air and water quality) whereas others are getting worse (such as farmland bird numbers, access to green space, or climate change emissions).

Taken as a whole, global ecosystems, upon which UK interests and well being depend, are getting dramatically worse. Issues such as transport and travel are at present ineffectively controlled, and their consequences for air quality, climate change and community breakdown unconstrained.

We are moving from a focus on what we can control - IPC authorisations, effluent consent limits, etc. - towards a broader focus on full environmental and social consequence regardless of long-established regulatory levers.

Environmental employees of the future will need a broader level of awareness of how the environment works and the full dependencies and pressure of society and business upon it, then to translate this into measures that can be used to drive business performance and innovation.

Society is becoming less respectful of authority, the prime indicator of which is fast-declining voter turnout. As a result, the voluntary sector is seeing something of resurgence as people rely upon collective action rather than the government to sort out issues for them.

This trend is also reflected in an increasingly litigious society, more likely to sue for damages than ever before and less deferential to regulators to sort out all perceived ills.

The good news is that, as our understanding of cause and environmental (and indeed social) effect gets more sophisticated, the need for applied environmental expertise into up front decision-making will never have been greater.