We thought you may like to start your tour of our Environmental Practitioner ProgrammeTM by signing in at www.epaw.co.uk to recognise our copyright and receive our monthly Impacts e-bulletin.

This short trip shows how an environmental practitioner can be motivated through growing environmental awareness of the problems, check out relevant information to carry out an environmental risk assessment, then plan to reduce environmental impacts, and finally promote the wider vision of sustainable development.

Before you start you may like to test your knowledge about environmental matters at work with an interactive quiz.

The tour starts with the big environmental issues. Choose one of the seven main environmental issues you want to find out more about. e.g atmosphere,

You will find that there are "pop up's" that give you a 'factoid" and "more info" buttons that lead to more in depth information - here concerning climate change. Everywhere you can access other relevant outside web sites. We have permission to link with over 60 organisations.

At each stage, there are activities to translate the text into learning by doing. E.g With Activity 1.1 you work out the possible impacts when carrying out an everyday activity like making a cup of tea. The activities get progressively more practical and more related with the workplace. There are guides for each unit and a site_map if you get lost.

The next unit equips potential practitioners with ways to help managers of environmental management systems. One of the first things to do is clarify the meaning of "aspects" and "impacts", so there is an interactive drop and drag game to your understanding.

There are layers of information about energy, waste, transport and food, and environmental law to help you carry out an environmental risk assessment. This is used to set targets against indicators and measure progress.

Unit 3 turns environmental policies into work practices and is based on a set of nine principles for environmental improvement. One of the principles is Environmental Management, where you can take a quiz to test your EM knowledge. People check out how principles become practices and then take steps to carry out environmental practices - hence the name of the Environmental Practitioner Programme.

The final unit gets Environmental Practitionersto step outside their own organisation and find out what is meant by sustainable development before checking what other companies may doing to promote sustainable development. They then suggest ways of working with partners to help promote sustainable development.

All our online materials are written for competence-based assessment and have been piloted among small, medium and large companies. The materials have been written to comply where possible with existing national training standards (see the national environment training framework), or for internal continuing professional development. The Environmental Practitioner Programme is suitable for candidates at Advanced Level (or level 3 in NVQ speak).

Having completed the programme, Environmental Practitioners can help achieve the targets set by ISO 14001, make suggestions for improvements for environment and the bottom line, and help support all employees either complying with ISO 14001 or improving environmental effectiveness.

Now enjoy the complete journey.....

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