ABSTRACT
The pollution and the environmental impact created by the current productive process, the premature obsolescence and the unnecessary disposal of products are relevant issues for Brazilian companies. This chapter presents background information about environmental management in Brazil bearing in mind the environmental risks produced by the productive process of organizations. Basic concepts of environmental management and their stages in organizations, such as reactive, preventive and proactive, are described. Also several levels of industrial environmental consciousness are presented. Next, according to the proactive stage, this chapter describes the concepts of the traditional functional areas related to safety and health, human resources, production and operations, marketing, fi nance and their infl uence on environmental management. These concepts can help industries reduce the environmental impacts they generate. We conclude by presenting some studies that show how Brazilian organizations have been managing the environmental risk. These studies reveal that Brazilian companies, to become environmentally proactive, still have a lot to accomplish as far as environmental risk management is concerned. This statement has implications for environmental education fi eld of local universities, responsible for training the future risk management professionals. Conclusions and refl ections on this issue are also provided.
