Читать книгу Patty's Industrial Hygiene, Program Management and Specialty Areas of Practice - Группа авторов - Страница 94

Safety and health have long been important to business with the vast majority of midsized to large organizations having distinct departments or groups devoted to this activity. This has included a trend to combine environmental departments with safety and industrial hygiene because of the overlap in responsibilities, technical knowledge, and the similar skills employed. Most recently, this trend has been superseded by a new grouping of professionals in a domain called sustainability or corporate social responsibility (CSR). While not all companies have a Chief Sustainability or CSR Officer, many environment, safety and health (ESH) department roles, responsibilities, and goals are either influenced or determined by this function. This is why sustainability is an important concept for the safety and health professional to understand and for which to develop the skills to be able to function in this space.

What is sustainability and CSR and how has it impacted the practice of safety and health? First, it is necessary to understand the difference between what we broadly call sustainability and CSR. Sustainability is a concept that focuses on the assuring a future for the organization while CSR is centered on the ethical practices and benefits of an organization to society in the present as well as the future. As one example, philanthropy is a central theme for CSR while preservation of natural resources is central to sustainability. Nevertheless, the two concepts are fairly closely aligned since each considers the impact of the business on society and the environment as well as both also requiring equable economic progress. It should also be noted here that environmental, social, and governance (ESG) is also used to describe the same concept as CSR. In our analysis, we will focus on sustainability while recognizing the close relationship to CSR or ESG.

This chapter starts with a historical review of the adoption of sustainability as standard business practice by most major corporations and in many other sectors such as the financial sector, medical care, and hospitals, the military, cities, and states as well as most agencies in the federal government. The next section describes current trends affecting the practice of safety and health within the sustainability realm. The last section summarizes the role of the safety and health professional in sustainability.