ABSTRACT
The term environmental impact comprises a range of phenomena of varying natures and degrees of importance. The author must distinguish the use of renewable resources and non-renewable resources from the impact of human activity on various aspects of the environment. Concern with the impact of human activity on the environment generally leads to the consideration of four variables: the type of resources consumed; how critical they are and both the nature and seriousness of the impact. Environmental governance seeks to construct itself through three kinds of integration: the horizontal integration of environmental concerns and constraints into sector-specific policies; the vertical integration of global environmental threats into local levels of governance; temporal integration, by considering the long term when formulating and operationalising public action. In reply to the question of whether environmental governance has a notable effect on the reform of governance as such, we use horizontal integration as an indication of whether innovation in the realm of environmental governance has occurred.
