Must Obey: Environmental Audit

Environmental issues towards business sector

Nowadays, environmental issues was massively campaigned in many ways. After the Industry Revolution, the natural resources was wildly exploited due to economic interest. Beside the decreasing of natural resources after exploitation, the industries were also produce waste that may harming the environment. Therefore, people are recently aware about natural depletion after utilized for years.

This phenomenon ignites people who aware for the risk in the future and people who being victims to speak, start to make movement, and appeal to their government. So, in some countries, the regulation consists of several compulsory or mandatory environmental management instruments. Moreover, environmental regulation already being major requirement for business set up permit.

In Indonesia, the government starts to concern about Environmental Law enforcement in 1973, when Indonesia being one of member of The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1980, Indonesia has its first Ministry on Environmental Protection Affairs, which lead by Prof. Emil Salim.

Regulation and other Law enforcement related Environmental

Currently, Facing the global economy circumstances, Environmental Issues get even wider impact to various businesses. Furthermore, it influence various human living aspect, such as education, social, politics, and economy for sure.

When most people divided countries based on development criteria, economy was being the driver to decide whether a country is developing or developed one. As close to economy, the environment became major thing to be considered among development activities. The environment protection instruments has various forms based on a country’s condition.

Indonesia has issued Indonesian Republic Act number 32 Year 2009 about Environment Protection and Management as national main regulation that ruling every activity including development in order to protect and manage the environment. In Article 14, the government established 13 instruments of Pollution prevention and Environment damage. One of those instruments is Envrionmental audit.

Audit as Environment Protection Instrument

Generally, people would simply aware about environmental audit as ISO 14001 Environmental management System Audit. Yet as you know, it was environmental audit that held voluntarily. According to the Regulation of Environment Ministry of Indonesia number 3 Year 2013, Environmental Audit was divided into two forms, namely voluntary and mandatory audit. The voluntary audit could be held by ISO 14001 Audit, yet the mandatory one was quite strictly determined in that Regulation, starting from the auditor qualification until business classification which obligated to carry the audit.

From Annex 1 of Regulation of Environment Ministry of Indonesia number 3 Year 2013 about Environmental Audit, there are 5 kind of busines that obligated to perform the audit. Such as,

Industries

Public Works

Energy and Mineral Resources

Nuclear Development

Hazardous Material and Hazardous Waste Processing.

Based on ISO 19011, Audit was defined as a sistematic, independent, and documented process to obtaining audit evidence and evaluating it objectively to determine the extent to which audit criteria are fulfilled. In terms of environmental audit, audit evidence mean records or statements of fact or other information which are relevant and verifiable related to environmental aspects and impacts. Then, audit criteria was environmental regulations.

Different with ISO 14001 audit, the mandatory environmental audit was mainly focused in legal or regulation compliance. The results of the audit were expected to obtain compliance evidence, ‘root cause’ problem identification, environmental management performance, and recommendation for improvements.

Environmental Protection

Industrial activities caused environmental impact in various aspects and level. Namely, air, water, soil, groundwater, sea and ocean. Indonesia it self has not less than 30 national regulations that used to be major requirement for environmental management. For certain region, the local regulations also have important role in environmental management that have to be complied by industries.

Economic interest was desired by all nation in this earth. However, the nature has its own limit in bearing the human needs, after all. As people starting to feel the impact of natural resources depletion, the environment protection perspective must penetrate the economy concept. So, the development as the way to meet the human needs requirement, will held wisely in terms to save the earth for the future. We can start to join this wise movement by comply the regulation.