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regulation — English
Nowadays all developed countries and most developing countries have official environmental management systems to protect the environment according to promulgated environmental legislation (that is, laws or acts). Owing to the fact that national environmental acts must cover all eventualities and all areas, they are often generic and rather vague on detail. That is the nature of all legislation. However, in one way or the other, all of these environmental acts provide for individual and/or specialised circumstances and cases. These subservient provisions are regulations and they are legally as binding as the “umbrella legislation”, that is, the Environmental Acts, which – in South Africa – would be the National Environmental Management Act, number 107 of 1998, popularly known as NEMA (see “environmental management”). Strong environmental legislation, as we have in South Africa, demands an environmental management plan (EMP) for each proposed development project or human activity that might significantly impact on the environment. The EMP stipulates the specific details of the actions to minimize and ameliorate or “soften” the impact of the development on the environment.
