This past year, the World Bank helped establish a Forest Management Transformation Initiative that will bring together leading private enterprises, nongovernmental and community specialists, and international financial institutions to help remove constraints to adopting sustainable practices throughout the forest-product value chain. Effective partnerships are also becoming more common at the transnational level. Since the Earth Summit in 1992, for example, regional seas programs have made important progress in the Baltic, Mediterranean, Black, and Aral Seas and in Lake Victoria. The sharing of international rivers is also being addressed, albeit slowly. Improved management practices are always a complement to, and sometimes a substitute for, investment in equipment.
Good managers can achieve large improvements in the environment at little cost.
In Latin America, improved efficiency stemming from the privatization of mining activities has sharply improved the management of tailings and wastewater. And in Egypt, recent technical assistance provided to improve the management of steel plants has transformed their environmental performance from among the worst to among the best in the developing world. Conversely, bad managers can wipe out the benefits of new technologies. Thousands of heavily polluting industrial plants around the world have purchased equipment incorporating expensive environmental technologies that is currently either unused or poorly maintained. The new environmentalism, therefore, gives strong emphasis to good housekeeping and managerial improvements and to the reform of public enterprises.