Environmental Management

Environmental management is the management of human activities and interactions with the environment. It attempts to integrate social, cultural and economic systems with the natural world (view interactive feature). Environmental management efforts vary in purpose, scale and methods, depending on the ecosystem and the human population in question.

Environmental management is complex and faces many challenges: competing interests among different groups who rely on natural resources, inappropriate policies and incentives, limited institutional capacity, and absence of alignment between ecological and administrative boundaries.

Environmental management is of particular importance in the oil sands region, where a great part of the province's wealth lies in its stock of natural resources—minerals, forests and fisheries—and where the groups who use these resources have differing priorities.

This module explores the relevant Regulatory Frameworks, the Policies and Initiatives that supported these frameworks, and how Policies are implemented. This is followed by a description of the Environmental Monitoring activities involved in RAMP.

To view some of the major steps involved in an oil sands project, see the environmental management interactive feature.