Environmental health, low carbon development and food safety are among the top priorities of Hong Kong today. On a world scale, managing resources well and living in harmony with nature are the keys to a sustainable future. These issues and core concerns however are interdependent of each other. A case in point is the fear that produce and other food products from Japan may be contaminated with radiation after the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. While this appears to be a food safety issue, the mishap is closely connected with the ever-increasing demand in energy of the human society. This incident and other local environmental health issues, such as the controversies of whether a modern incinerator should be built in Hong Kong, have refocused public attention to the imminent need to build a healthy, clean and resource efficient society together with proper food monitoring, handling and processing management systems for the prevention of food poisoning and evironmental degradation.

By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the major objective of the programme is to integrate management techniques into the technicalities of environmental protection for safeguarding public health and restoring environmental integrity. In addition to the conventional issues of environmental protection, the interconnection among regulatory control, policy, management techniques, social and ethical values, health risk analysis and environmental conservation will be covered in detail. This programme also covers a number of important and popular international standards related to environment and public health: ISO 14001, ISO 50001, ISO 14064, ISO 22000 and OHSAS 18001. Students should be competent to set up the respective systems and perform internal audits of the respective standard for an organization.

The programme is offered on both part-time (2-4 years, with 2 years as the recommended duration) and full-time (12 months) bases. Lectures, tutorials, seminars and field trips will be conducted mainly on weekday evenings and sometimes on Saturdays or Sundays. Merit-based scholarships are offered to the top two graduates in each graduation group with the additional criterion that their GPA must be above 3.5.

The distribution of workload is stated below with one unit equivalent to 12 hours of lecture or 42 hours of independent research studies.