NEBOSH Diploma in Environmental Management Element 7 In this blog post I take a look at the key sources of information that can be accessed to understand the environment in an area. As you might be aware, it is generally a legal requirement for environmental information collected by public bodies to be made available to the public. Pretty much all of this information can be accessed for free on the internet. First we’ll look at the Environment Agency, who operate a site known as ‘what’s in your backyard’. Here you can access a broad range of environment related information covering issues such as flooding, nitrate vulnerable zones, landfill sites and…
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Are More Flood Defences The Answer?
NEBOSH Diploma in Environmental Management Element 11 The recent floods in late December 2015 and early January 2016 have been some of the worst on record. Many thousands of people have been affected and the cost of damage caused by the floods is projected to be over £1.5 billion. I thought in this blog post it would be interesting to take a look at what causes flooding and how flood risk can be managed. Historically, flooding was reduced by the building of flood defences for communities with little consideration of keeping water in uplands and flood plains. Such techniques might include building flood barriers (think the Thames Barrier) and installing…
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Natural Cycles and Their Delicate Environmental Balance
Being quite a keen cyclist I want to talk to you about natural cycles – no, not about biking around the countryside but how substances and elements are moved around in nature. If you research how long the planet has been in existence you will come up with a figure of 4 billon years, give or take a few million. Yet, even after all this time, substances on which nature relies to exist have not been consumed. This seems a little odd, when you think about it – 4 billon years is a very long time. But it’s because Earth is essentially a closed-loop system: very little gets in and…
